Musubi: An Open Mobile Social Network

Abstract

[evdate 2011-12-19] IAS Distinguished Lecture. Co-sponsored by School of Engineering.

Duration: 75 min.

Abstract: 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 750 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.

This talk presents the architecture of an open mobile social internet where users can interact with each other without signing up to a proprietary network. Prof Lam and her research group have created a prototype system called Musubi which uniquely provides disintermediated social sharing services; all communication is supported using public key encryption thus leaking no user information to a third party. Musubi is also a platform that facilitates the development of disintermediated social applications. Musubi is available on the Android market.

Monica Lam has been a Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University since 1988. She received her PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. She is the Faculty Director of the Stanford MobiSocial Computing Laboratory. Her current research interest is in creating open social computing platforms. She has worked in the areas of high-performance computing, compiler optimizations, software analysis to improve security, and simplifying computer management with virtualization. Prof Lam is a co-author of the 'Dragon Book' and the founding CEO of MokaFive, a desktop virtualization company started by her research group. She is also a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).