Social Networking as a Platform for Innovative ICT Services

The past few years, surely the most dynamic period in the history of ICT industry, were irretrievably labelled by the global proliferation of the social networking phenomena. Social networking did not only change the way people use the Internet and their communication devices but also enabled companies to offer innovative ICT services based on new business models. As an example, today social recommender systems drive customers’ purchasing decisions and identify popular topics for portal headline stories. Furthermore, marketing agencies redesigned their digital marketing campaigns and now they cluster social networks into densely-connected sub-networks to target most influential individuals in those sub-networks for achieving best viral marketing effect. Finally, telecom operators switched their customer management paradigm from customer relationship management (CRM) to customer-managed relationship (CMR) by building implicit social connections among their users to offer them group-oriented services. This talk will present technical, social and business challenges, as well as opportunities, for companies offering social-aware ICT services.

Short Bio
Vedran Podobnik is an Assistant Professor at the Telecommunication Department of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb.  He received M.Eng. (2006, Electrical Engineering) and Ph.D. (2010, Computer Science) degrees from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb. As a junior researcher, he received the Croatian Annual National Award for Science in the field of technical sciences (2011, awarded by the Croatian Parliament), as well as the Silver Plaque „Josip Loncar“ award for outstanding doctoral dissertation and particularly successful scientific research (2010, awarded by the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb). As a PhD student, he received the Croatian Annual National Award SCIENCE in area of technical and biotechnical sciences (2007, awarded by the Croatian Science Foundation).  His research interests include social networks, multi-agent systems, electronic markets, context-aware services, business process automation and the semantic web. He co-authored over 40 scientific and professional papers as book chapters and articles in encyclopedia, journals and conference proceedings. He is a member of IEEE and KES International associations.