Towards personal, social, and urban awareness

In the past decades, numerous research efforts have been made to model and extract the contexts of users in pervasive computing environments. The recent explosion of sensor-equipped mobile phone market and the phenomenal growth of geo-tagged data (Twitter messages, Foursquare check-ins, etc.) have enabled the analysis of new dimensions of contexts that involve the social and urban context. The technology trend towards pervasive sensing and large-scale social and community computing is making "Social and Community Intelligence (SCI)" a new research area that aims at investigating individual/group behavior patterns, community and urban dynamics based on the "digital footprints." It is believed that the SCI technology has the potential to revolutionize the field of context-aware computing. The aim of this chapter is to identify this emerging research area, present the research background, define the general system framework, characterize its unique properties, discuss the open research challenges, and present this emerging research field.