Social group formation with mobile cloud services

Abstract

Social networks have become quite popular these days, and the creation of social groups of people with common interests results in sharing and collaborative relationships between the members. Besides, cloud computing and mobile computing domains have advanced rapidly and are the promising technologies for the near future. Mobile technologies are recently drawing their attention to the cloud computing due to the increasing demand of the applications for processing power, storage space and energy. To bring the benefits from these different developments together, we tried to build an Android application, CroudSTag, which aids in forming social groups of common interest, from the mobile devices. The application obtains a set of pictures/videos from a storage cloud, uses cloud services like the video processing and the face recognition from multiple cloud providers to identify the people from the media content, and aids in forming social groups on facebook, a well-known social network. The application is explained along with detailed architectural and technological choices. The performance analysis of the application shows that the social groups can be formed with significant ease and reasonable performance latencies from the mobile devices. © 2012 Springer-Verlag London Limited.