Human Centered Computing: Collaborate and Social Computing (Research Paper Sample)

Human Centered Computing: collaborate and social computing
Abstract
With the current advancement of Internet and the Web, human-centered computing has stretched out and facilitated Collaboration and social interactions to a very great extent. Social computing, being a cross-disciplinary research and application field, a new paradigm of computing and technology development has become the central theme of a number of Information and Communication Technology areas. The intention of this paper is to analyze collaborative and social computing and investigate how human-centered computing can be used to improve it.
1 Introduction.
The rapid progress of the Internet as a new platform for social and collaborative interactions and the usage of social online mobile applications have led to the research areas of human-centered computing in collaborative and social computing systems to receive an increasing interest from academic and research institutions. Social computing has therefore become an important field in the research agenda. Online communities are changing the fundamental way in which people share information and communicate amongst each other. This has affected the economy and every aspect of our lives. The advancement of Internet and Web technologies, the increasing accessibility of computing resources and mobile devices, the prevalent media consumption sources and subsequent social, economic, and cultural changes, computing know-how and application have a terrific bang over the past decade. [1] Social information studies have revealed that Information and Communication Technology and society influence each other. Thus, social computing has emphasized technology development for society and incorporating social theories into the development. Social computing infrastructure encompasses web, database, multimedia, wireless, agent, and software engineering techniques. One driving force of social computing is the desire to create more capable infrastructures to support collaborative work and online communities to invent new types of social media and communication.
2 History
The idea of collaborate and social computing can be traced back to 19402 in Vanneval Bush’s seminal 1945 Atlantic Monthly paper. [1] In this research, he conceived a memory and communication device called the memex. He also proposed many far-reaching ideas decades before researchers actively worked on them, or they became every day computing terms. To support social communications and interactions, it relies on human-computer interaction; communication; physiological; sociological; anthropological; and economic theories; and social network analysis. In 1973, an influential computer scientist and researcher, Turoff played a significant role in the development of many early government projects that were premised on CMC and the use of social computing knowledge management and collaborative learning. [2] Turoff significant contribution to the history of social computing was the NSF-funded Electronic Information Exchange (EIES), which feature a computerized conferencing system for research communities and functioned as a means for human groups to exercise “collective intelligence”.
Turoff was also involved in several research projects based on social constructivist principles as group decision support, computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW), groupware, and others which used CMC tools and processes to enable social interaction and user participation activities like voting, rating and ranking that can be viewed as precursors to current reputation systems and tagging functionality now present in modern Web 2.0 - based social software application. [2] SixDegrees.com was the first social networking site launched in 1997. [8] Over the last decade, so many social networking sites have started and many have failed or declined in popularity. Facebook is currently the largest social network followed by MySpace. Linked in is another social network site that specifically targets professional networking. Some Social Network Sites are very specific targeted for particular communities of user.

3 Social Computing
An emerging computing model for society on the Web referred to as social computing” that can address the most critical success factors for clinical trials: well-maintained open communication among the health care providers, the media, clinical trial sponsors, and the public to overcome real and perceived barrier to clinical research participation. The current younger generation are believed to leverage IT fully for personal networking and communications. In fact, they depend heavily on technology for their daily life, such as text messaging with friends, writing reports for school assignments and listening to music. From a technology perspective, as commodity hardware and software technologies reach the masses, computing power migrate to the edge of the network, and the computing on the hand-held devices become as powerful as the desktop computers.
With the high-speed wireless network and powerful handheld devices such as cell phones and personal digital assistants, social computing has expanded its playing field to the pervasive mobile infrastructure. Real time text messaging became the primary means of communication among the younger generation. If the healthcare providers, the media and the public use real-time text messaging to exchange ideas and up-to-date information, some of the issues in clinical trials, such as overcoming real perceived barriers to clinical research participation can collect current, accurate data in a timely manner, can be adequately addressed. Of course security issues and compliance with privacy laws must be dealt with in order to use text messaging as a means for communication and data collection in clinical trials.
4 Enterprise Social Networking
Social computing is making its mark in different spheres of life. It’s an emerging trend in learning, businesses and organizations and social life. [3] It is diffusing through almost every aspect of computer interaction. Mostly, it facilitates communication, collaboration and socialization and fosters online networks, friendship and relationships among individuals and groups or communities, hence, harnessing their relational social capital. [4] These two forms of capital in this case, with values embedded in and accruing from the online relationships and social networks individuals and groups have among themselves while utilizing SC applications such as wikis, social networking sites, blogs and virtual worlds. [2]
The efficiencies social computing can provide to enterprises are many and varied. Its very nature, Social Computing offers ubiquitous, distributed, many-to-many value-based, real-time collaborative and personalized enterprise computing. [3] All this holds the potential for the competitive edge for enterprises leveraging SC applications. Instances in the later are blogs, wikis, virtual worlds and social networking sites. Social computing is part of the social Web. Social computing is essentially about the manner in which people use the Social Web to serve their personals and social needs and interests in Virtual environments. It’s about putting technology- in particular the social network in the hands of individuals and communities and allowing them to use it in the way that suits them. [4]
This evolving social use of the Web has given rise to a people-centric Web characterized by user-created content, repurposed content, user –driven artifacts and user-generated applications. By this very nature, Social Computing moves computing to the edge of the network, thereby empowering individual users to use the Web to harness their creativity, expertise, and collective intelligence.[2] Social computing also taps into lightweight computing tools that facilitate the mashing up of applications and grass-root innovations by individual users. Additionally, it facilitates a shift from desktop computing to network-centric computing. [3] This move has the potential to transform the computing playing field in relation to how individuals interact with the web.
4.1 Web 2.0 Social Networking Sites
Offline social networks have existed since the beginning of humankind and have been the study of anthropologists for many years. [8] Social network can be groups of people who have interacted in the past for some common purposes or interest, and that have ongoing relationships with members of the group. Membership in networks can be relatively permanent or flexible and short-term. The shared experiences and perceived values or needs can build trust among members and value such that members tend to rely on each other and understand shared information to be reliable and trustworthy. [6]
In the past decades, advances in technology have made it possible to use electronic communication tools to create social network applications and online social networks. The applications, sometimes called social networking tools, are web-based locations that let users create a self-profile and connect with others. This type of implementation is part of the Web 2.0 evolution toward more collaboration via web. MySpace, LinkedIn, and Facebook are some of the largest while the terminology is used to describe these sites varies. Recently, the term Social Networking has become the common way to refer to them.
Social Networking sites are organized around people. Earlier online communities and their websites were organized around interests and topics. A unique characteristic of Social Networking Sites is that users can specify their social networks and make them visible to others. [8] This is done by users developing profiles of themselves and identifying acquaintances. The starting point for a new user is to develop their profile which typically contains a picture of the user and some demographic information....