Group coordination and negotiation through spatial proximity regions around mobile devices on augmented tabletops

In large, complex societies, assorting with others with similar social norms or behaviors can facilitate successful coordination and cooperation. The ability to recognize others with shared norms or behaviors is thus assumed to be under selection. As a medium of communication, human art might reflect fitness-relevant information on shared norms and behaviors of other individuals thus facilitating successful coordination and cooperation. Distinctive styles or patterns of artistic design could signify migration history, different groups with a shared interaction history due to spatial proximity, as well as individual-level expertise and preferences. In addition, cultural boundaries may be even more pronounced in a highly diverse and socially stratified society. In the current study, we focus on a large corpus of an artistic tradition called kolam that is produced by women from Tamil Nadu in South India (N = 3, 139 kolam drawings from 192 women) to test whether stylistic variations in art can be mapped onto caste boundaries, migration and neighborhoods. Since the kolam art system with its sequential drawing decisions can be described by a Markov process, we characterize variation in styles of art due to different facets of an artist's identity and the group affiliations, via hierarchical Bayesian statistical models. Our results reveal that stylistic variations in kolam art only weakly map onto caste boundaries, neighborhoods, and regional origin. In fact, stylistic variations or patterns in art are dominated by artist-level variation and artist expertise. Our results illustrate that although art can be a medium of communication, it is not necessarily marked by group affiliation. Rather, artistic behavior in this context seems to be primarily a behavioral domain within which individuals carve out a unique niche for themselves to differentiate themselves from others. Our findings inform discussions on the evolutionary role of art for group coordination by encouraging researchers to use systematic methods to measure the mapping between specific objects or styles onto groups.

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Understanding Social Characteristic from Spatial Proximity in Mobile Social Network

International Journal of Computers Communications & Control ◽

10.15837/ijccc.2015.4.1991 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 10 (4) ◽

pp. 539 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Duan Hu ◽

Benxiong Huang ◽

Lai Tu ◽

Shu Chen

Keyword(s):

Social Networks ◽

Social Network ◽

Mobile Devices ◽

Hybrid Approach ◽

Spatial Proximity ◽

Mobile Social Networks ◽

Mobile Social Network ◽

Data Repositories ◽

Sensing Applications ◽

Proximity Matrix

Over the past decades, cities as gathering places of millions of people rapidly evolved in all aspects of population, society, and environments. As one recent trend, location-based social networking applications on mobile devices are becoming increasingly popular. Such mobile devices also become data repositories of massive human activities. Compared with sensing applications in traditional sensor network, Social sensing application in mobile social network, as in which all individuals are regarded as numerous sensors, would result in the fusion of mobile, social and sensor data. In particular, it has been observed that the fusion of these data can be a very powerful tool for series mining purposes. A clear knowledge about the interaction between individual mobility and social networks is essential for improving the existing individual activity model in this paper. We first propose a new measurement called geographic community for clustering spatial proximity in mobile social networks. A novel approach for detecting these geographic communities in mobile social networks has been proposed. Through developing a spatial proximity matrix, an improved symmetric nonnegative matrix factorization method (SNMF) is used to detect geographic communities in mobile social networks. By a real dataset containing thousands of mobile phone users in a provincial capital of China, the correlation between geographic community and common social properties of users have been tested. While exploring shared individual movement patterns, we propose a hybrid approach that utilizes spatial proximity and social proximity of individuals for mining network structure in mobile social networks. Several experimental results have been shown to verify the feasibility of this proposed hybrid approach based on the MIT dataset.

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