Social Cloud Computing

This event has ended.

With the increasingly ubiquitous nature of social networks (Facebook, Twitter and Instagram) and Cloud computing (DropBox, Amazon Web Services), users are starting to explore new ways to interact with, and exploit these developing paradigms. 

Social networks are used to reflect real world relationships that allow users to share information and form connections between one another, through family, colleagues and friends networks. Behind every user on a social network sits a computational infrastructure used to connect the user to other members of the community, ranging in complexity from a smart phone to a supercomputer, with variably storage, computation and availability (uptime) profiles. 

We propose leveraging the pre-established trust formed through relationships within a social network to form a dynamic “Social Cloud”, enabling friends to share such computational resources to enable data sharing and computation. Combining trust relationships with suitable incentive mechanisms (through financial payments or bartering) could provide much more sustainable computational resource sharing, leading to the creation of community resource sharing networks.

This talk outlines our vision of, and experiences with, creating a Social Cloud, from a community near Sao Paulo (Brazil) to a scientific community in Chicago (US).

Please join us for refreshments from 5pm in the VJ Gallery and again after the lecture.