Team Members:
Abhishek SamantaFangfei ZhouRavi Sundaram
Background:
People often have the need for assistance from strangers in remote locations. Consider the following requests: please
tell the marathon runner with bib #123 I will wait at the finish line; did I leave my keychain on campus? is there a brown puppy roaming in the playground? In this paper we
propose, not just a new architecture, but, in fact, a new cloud based service - SamaritanCloud - the goal is to provide a way for people to connect with others (possibly strangers)
in a remote location and obtain (physical) help from them. SamaritanCloud is deployed as cell phone application, users submit their requests to the cloud which coordinates users’
requests and efficiently find possible candidates to respond to the request. Such a service will require efficient technical solutions to problems such as scalability, privacy, reputation
etc to overcome the social barriers of soliciting help from strangers. We focus primarily on the technical aspects of scalability and privacy (matching people with strangers in a
secure and private way) so that the need for help and the ability/desire to assist are disclosed safely.
Since the emergence of online social networks (OSNs), people have sought help from their social contacts. The most common method to seek for help on social network sites,
e.g, Facebook, Twitter, or “strangers helping strangers” [1], is post - an user posts his/her question or request on his/her social network page or a relative group page and waits for
response, which is very similar to subscribing to an email list and broadcast questions except exposing more privacy. This and other methods proposed so far ([1]-[24])have some disadvantages including loss of privacy (in terms of both location as well as the nature of the help sought) and high response times.
Goal:
The main goal of this project is to propose a scalable mobile infrastructure that enables a group of mobile and geographically-dispersed personal computing devices to form a cloud for the purpose of privately sharing relevant locality-specific information.
Publication:
[ Abhishek Samanta, Fangfei Zhou, Ravi Sundaram. SamaritanCloud: Secure and Scalable Infrastructure for enabling Location-based Services in IFIP Networking 2013 ]
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