Our focus is to let everyone interact socially with each other, without having to join the same proprietary social network.
The success of the project lies in making it FUN for the users and EASY for software developers.
We will create:

• Novel and attractive social interaction paradigms
• Seamless social experience across hybrid devices
• Open, egalitarian social and mobile computing architecture and platform
• SocialKit: open-source software for phones, tablets, PCs, TVs for creating social-network agnostic applications.
• Compelling representative applications
• Real-life trials
• A development community

Musubi is a non-proprietary social internet and application platform for phones.

All the social networks available today are "social intranets". To interact, users must belong to the same proprietary network who owns and controls all of the users' personal data as well as the application platform. With social networks like Facebook boasting of over 900 million users, it is possible that a monopoly in social networks may emerge, putting at risk not just personal privacy but open competition as well.

Musubi is a next-generation architecture for a "social internet" designed for the phone, where there is no sole proprietary owner of all data exchanged through the network. Musubi's open and neutral nature encourages broad-based adoption, from handheld providers, network operators, and application developers.

The social network infrastructure consists of a set of core secure encrypted messaging services. Data are decrypted on users' phones and can be backed up to PCs or cloud services of the user's choice.

The Musubi social platform supports a new class of applications: peer-to-peer applications, centralized applications with identity protection, peer-nominated proximity applications, leverage of local devices, and personal analytics.

Musubi is available in the Android Market.

Much of our lives is captured in online communication and digital transactions. Our passively acquired digital life-logs capture interesting stories about ourselves. Who were our forgotten friends in high school or college? What are the significant people, places and things in our lives? When were we happy, sad, angry or in love? What happened in our lives in the year 1999?

We are particularly interested in solutions that preserve privacy, e.g. by extracting information on our own devices, so users can be comfortable to bare it all: our health info, our work, and our activities on all the different social media.

muse

Muse (Memories Using Email) is a program that helps users muse over long-term email archives. It mines email to help the user to reminisce about the past. It automatically derives the user's social topology based on email patterns and lets user browse and further edit groups in the topology.

Click here to try out Muse on your own email archives.
Muse is reviewed by New Scientist.

slant: personal search engine

Why get served thousands of results from the same search engine? Instead, create custom search engines that index only websites mentioned in our social chatter (e.g. email and tweets we follow). The search engine knows what's on our mind and can return results with very little typing. Just type in 243, you may get the home page of the CS243 course you are taking currently. Our user study suggests that the results of just thousands of web pages can return different but equally rated results than the billions indexed by general search engines. Our software runs on our personal device and submit the list of webpages to a Google custom search engine.

Click here to try out Slant.

personalized browser

Our personal browser reads pages we visit and highlights all the terms that are meaningful to us based on the names mentioned in our email conversations. We can read dense pages, which is useful for handling the constant information overload we face. We may also serendipitously get reminded of people we have forgotten; simply click on the highlighted term to get transported to the exact email conversation involving the individual of interest.

Click here to try out the personalized browser.

groupgenie--discover your social groups without tears

By analyzing our tagged photos and email correspondences, we can deduce and discover our circles of friends, including important social subgroups within larger groups of friends. This presents a much richer, nuanced view of our social landscape, which is missing from today’s plain, old view of our flat social graph. We have developed an algorithm that derives our social topology from our personal data, and a publicly available system called GroupGenie, that enables users to deduce, browse, edit and save their social topologies. Eliminating the tedium of group creation encourages more private sharing, and helps users make sense of their ever-growing social graph of friends.

GroupGenie is publicly available as a Facebook application, try it out here.
Our project, previously known as SocialFlows, was reported on the front pages of MIT Technology Review Today's Stories.

We view the phone as an extension of ourselves--we can wield our digital identity and personality to interact with people we meet and things we see directly. We carry our favorite bookmarks, photo, games, and share them with people we meet. We can also connect different devices together for activities, such as playing music on a friend's jukebox or sharing youtube on a big-screen TV with a tap using NFC (near-field communication) technology. It is important that we can interact socially with the assistance of our phone without requiring any prior arrangement such as signing up to the same social website, nor do we wish all our activities be monitored by a big-brother portal.

We coin the term partyware to refer to the class of social software that assists us in our real-world social encounters. Junction is an infrastructure designed to support partyware. On the Junction platform, partyware run on end-point devices, with the help of a generic rendezvous service in the network, thus enhancing privacy as well as scalability. We believe this design will encourage the creation of more multi-party software. The conventional server-client model used in multi-party software is a barrier to entry--many would-be application developers do not have the ability to write and host scalable services. We have created a large number of applications using Junction including multi-party games, collaborate media sharing, and collaborative learning applications for under-served children.

For more information: read about our NFC demos in an Engadget article.
Junction is publicly available and its documentation is available here.

Currently, friends wishing to participate in social networking must join the same proprietary social network. We believe proprietary social networks will give way to open, federated social networking systems that are supported by a variety of vendors. Competition made possible by openness will offer consumers more choice and better services.

Our approach is to leverage email, allowing anybody with an email address to participate in social networking. Why email? Email is more pervasive than any social network; it is an open, federated platform that lets consumers choose their providers, including hosting their own if they so wish. Mr. Privacy keeps the communication in users' email. It provides an API that allows any application developer to define the data structures, which are automatically saved in distributed email repositories. Developers need not provide a central server; this requires significantly less effort and provides consumer with privacy automatically. We have validated the concept with SocialBar, an extension to Firefox for social browsing, and a GPS sharing application for both Android and iPhone.

The project is reviewed in an MIT Technology Review blogpost.
You can download SocialBar here.

Especially because of the mobile phone, there is a digital record of just about everything we do these days: our entire GPS traces, photos, videos, events on our calendar, emails, phone records, credit card histories, music and movies played. We refer to this body of knowledge as our personal cloud. We imagine that everybody will have a safe haven that enables one to store all this information in one place without hesitation. Automatic or semi-automatic techniques help us control access to our personal cloud. Not only can we access our own data, we can also tap into what our friends allow us to see.

Controlled sharing of possibly large amounts of personal data is supported by our Personal-Cloud Butler platform. The Personal-Cloud Butler service can be hosted at home on existing consumer products such as set-top boxes, game consoles, and broadband gateways. The Butler works in concert with mobile devices. Mobile devices collect data, which are then backed up to the Butler, they also provide users quick access to the data while on the road. Our Personal-Cloud Butlers implement the decentralized and standard OpenID protocols, support search of all data with an semantic index, and provide a high-level query language that hides the complexities of authentication, communication, and distribution from application developers.

Graph analysis is becoming increasingly important with the rise of social networks. Because SQL is lacking the expressiveness and performance needed for graph algorithms, lower-level, general-purpose languages are often used instead.

We evaluated SociaLite by running eight graph algorithms (Shortest Paths, PageRank, Hubs and Authorities, Mutual Neighbors, Connected Components, Triangles, Clustering Coefficients, and Betweenness Centrality) on two real-life social graphs, LiveJournal and Last.fm.

Our experiment demonstrates that SociaLite queries are succinct, requiring just one tenth the lines of code needed with Java. The optimizations proposed in this paper sped up almost all the algorithms by at least a factor of three and up to 22 fold. SociaLite's overhead when compared to optimized Java is less than 16%, which is tolerable given its advantage in programming simplicity.

Faculty	Students
Monica S. Lam (Faculty Director) Dan Boneh Jeff Heer Paul Kim Scott Klemmer Nick McKeown Roy Pea	Kanak Biscuitwala Hristo Bojinov Jesse Cirimele Ben Dodson Steve Fan Michael Fischer Sudheendra Hangal Te-Yuan Huang Joy Kim	Nicolas Kokkalis Diana MacLean Abhinay Nagpal Chanh Nguyen T.J. Purtell Jiwon Seo Arvind Satyanarayan Ian Vo

Visiting Scholars Kazumine Matoba, Fujitsu Kazuya Yokoyama, Sony Program Manager Darlene Hadding

Previous Members Chris Brigham Aemon Cannon Ruven Chu Alex Favaro Bobby Georgescu Hiroaki Kameyama, Fujitsu David Kettler

YongQiang Liu, NEC Matthew Nasielski Andreas Nomikos Neil Patel Seok-Won Seong Debangsu Sengupta Seng Keat Teh

Papers

• Processing Email Archives in Special Collections
  Sudheendra Hangal, Peter Chan, Monica S. Lam, and Jeffrey Heer
  In Proceedings of the Digital Humanities Conference (DH2012),
  Hamburg, Germany, July 2012.
  
  
• Who Killed My Battery: Analyzing Mobile Browser Energy Consumption
  Narendran Thiagarajan, Guarav Aggarwal, Angela Nicoara, Dan Boneh, and Jatinder Pal Singh
  In Proceedings of the 21st International WWW Conference (WWW2012)
  Lyon, France, April 2012. (Best Student Paper).
  
  
• Musubi: Disintermediated Interactive Social Feeds for Mobile Devices
  Ben Dodson, Ian Vo, T. J. Purtell, Aemon Cannon, and Monica S. Lam
  In Proceedings of the 21st International WWW Conference (WWW2012)
  Lyon, France, April 2012. (2nd Best Student Paper).
  
  
• A Mobile Social Network on ESP: an Egocentric Social Platform
  T. J. Purtell, Ian Vo, and Monica S. Lam
  February 2012.
  
  
• Effective Browsing and Serendipitous Discovery with an Experience-Infused Browser
  Sudheendra Hangal, Abhinay Nagpal, and Monica S. Lam
  In Proceedings of the 2012 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI)
  Lisbon, Portugal, February 2012.
  
  
• Friends, Romans, Countrymen: Lend me your URLs.
  Using Social Chatter to Personalize Web Search.
  Abhinay Nagpal, Sudheendra Hangal, Rifat Reza Joyee, and Monica S. Lam
  In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)
  Seattle WA, February 2012.
  
  
• MUSE: Reviving Memories Using Email Archives
  Sudheendra Hangal, Monica S. Lam, and Jeffrey Heer
  In Proceedings of the 24th ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST)
  Santa Barbara CA, October 2011.
  
  
• Micro-Interactions with NFC-Enabled Mobile Phones
  Ben Dodson and Monica S. Lam
  In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Mobile Computing, Applications, and Services (MobiCASE)
  Los Angeles, CA, October 2011.
  
  
• An Algorithm and Analysis of Social Topologies from Email and Photo Tags
  T. J. Purtell, Diana MacLean, Seng Keat Teh, Sudheendra Hangal, Monica S. Lam, and Jeffrey Heer
  In Proceedings of the Fifth ACM Workshop on Social Network Mining and Analysis
  Held in conjunction with the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD)
  San Diego, CA, August 2011.
  
  
• Email Clients as Decentralized Social Apps in Mr. Privacy
  Michael Fischer, T. J. Purtell, and Monica S. Lam
  In Proceedings of the 4th Hot Topics in Privacy Enhancing Technologies (HotPETs 2011)
  Waterloo ON, Canada, July 2011.
  
  
• OpenConflict: Preventing Real Time Map Hacks in Online Games
  E. Bursztein, M. Hamburg, J. Lagarenne, and D. Boneh
  In Proceedings of the 32rd IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
  Oakland CA, May 2011.
  (Best student paper award).
  
  
• Sentiment Analysis on Personal Email Archives
  Sudheendra Hangal and Monica S. Lam
  In Proceedings of the CHI 2011 Workshop--Personal Informatics & HCI: Design, Theory, & Social Implications.
  Held in conjunction with CHI 2011.
  Vancouver B. C., Canada May 2011.
  
  
• The Junction Protocol for Ad Hoc Peer-to-Peer Mobile Applications
  Ben Dodson, Aemon Cannon, Te-Yuan Huang, and Monica S. Lam
  April 2011.
  
  
• Groups Without Tears: Mining Social Topologies from Email
  Diana MacLean, Sudheendra Hangal, Seng Keat Teh, Monica S. Lam, and Jeffrey Heer
  In Proceedings of the 2011 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI)
  Palo Alto, CA, February 2011.
  
  
• Location privacy via private proximity testing
  A. Narayanan, N. Thiagarajan, M. Lakhani, M. Hamburg, and D. Boneh
  In Proceedings of the 18th Annual Network and Distributed System (NDSS)
  San Diego, CA, February 2011.
  (Distinguished paper award)
  
  
• Touch and Run with Near Field Communication (NFC)
  Ben Dodson, Hristo Bojinov, Monica S. Lam
  October 2010.
  
  
• Secure, Consumer-Friendly Web Authentication and Payments with a Phone
  Ben Dodson, Debangsu Sengupta, Dan Boneh, and Monica S. Lam
  In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Mobile Computing, Applications, and Services (MobiCASE)
  Santa Clara, CA, October 2010.
  
  
• PhoneNet: a Phone-to-Phone Network for Group Communication in a LAN
  Te-Yuan Huang, Kok-Kiong Yap, Ben Dodson, Monica S. Lam, and Nick McKeown
  In Proceedings of the Second ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Networking, Systems, and Applications on Mobile Handhelds
  Held in conjunction with SIGCOMM 2010
  New Delhi, India, August 2010.
  
  
• Towards Software-Friendly Networks
  Kok-Kiong Yap, Te-Yuan Huang, Ben Dodson, Monica S. Lam, and Nick McKeown
  In Proceedings of the 1st ACM Asia-Pacific Workshop on Systems (APSys 2010)
  Held in conjunction with SIGCOMM 2010
  New Delhi, India, August 2010.
  
  
• All Friends are Not Equal: Using Weights in Social Graphs to Improve Search
  Sudheendra Hangal, Diana MacLean, Monica S. Lam, and Jeffrey Heer
  In Proceedings of the Fourth ACM Workshop on Social Network Mining and Analysis
  Held in conjunction with ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD)
  Washington DC, July 2010.
  
  
• PrPl: a Decentralized Social Networking Infrastructure
  Seok-Won Seong, Jiwon Seo, Matthew Nasielski, Debangsu Sengupta, Sudheendra Hangal, Seng Keat Teh, Ruven Chu, Ben Dodson, and Monica S. Lam
  In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Mobile Cloud Computing & Services: Social Networks and Beyond
  (Invited Paper)
  Held in conjunction with Mobisys 2010
  San Francisco, June 2010.
  
  
• Life-Browsing with a Lifetime of Email
  Sudheendra Hangal and Monica S. Lam
  In Proceedings of the CHI 2010 Workshop--Know Thyself: Monitoring and Reflecting on Facets of One's Life
  Held in conjunction with CHI 2010 Atlanta GA, April 2010.
  
  
• InvisiType: Object-Oriented Security Policies
  Jiwon Seo and Monica S. Lam
  In Proceedings of the 17th Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium,
  San Diego, February 2010.
  
  

Demonstrations

• SocialFlows: A System for Mining Social Topologies from Ego-centric Social Networks
  Diana MacLean, Sudheendra Hangal, Seng Keat Teh, Monica S. Lam, and Jeffrey Heer
  In the 16th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
  Washington DC, July 2010.
  
  
• Dunbar: Mining Email Archives for Reviving Memories
  Sudheendra Hangal and Monica S. Lam
  In the 16th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
  Washington DC, July 2010.
  
  

Talks

• Reclaiming Data Ownership with the Tian-Di-Ren Architecture
  Monica S. Lam
  POMI Workshop, April 27, 2010.
  
  
• Building a Social Networking Future Without Big Brother
  Monica S. Lam
  Keynote Address, IBM Almaden Workshop, December 11, 2009.
  Salton Lecture, Cornell University, October 22, 2009.
  
  
• Personal-Cloud Computing
  Monica S. Lam
  Distinguished Lecture, University of California, Santa Barbara, January 16, 2009.