Being with us all the time, mobile devices will revolutionize our social life. We believe fundamentally that we should be able to interact with each other, without having to join the same proprietary social network. Our research approach is to create system platforms that 1) attract users by enabling innovative and attractive interaction paradigms and (2) attract developers by hiding the complexity in creating privacy-preserving applications.

This talk introduces three recent research results in this project. We will describe Junction, an infrastructure for ``partyware'' that enables people at a party to exchange information and collaborate easily and privately. To simplify the specification of access control, we have developed an algorithm that automatically infers important groups from one social activities such as email communications and tagged photos. Lastly, we will present Mr. Privacy, an attempt to create an open and federated social networking infrastructure by leveraging email.

We are in the process of creating a MobiSocial Laboratory whose goal is to bring together corporations interested in promoting open social computing.