From offline to online: connecting people with a mobile social networking application at a conference

People that we encounter and connect with at conferences, provide opportunities for extending our social networks from offline to online. How can users easily find and connect with the relevant people in the conference? We present Find & Connect, an application that combines proximity and homophily information. We conducted a user study and deployment of our application at the UbiComp 2011 conference, and discovered that most users found it useful for finding nearby people and making new connections. Studying the offline and online user behavior reveal that certain sessions are more conducive to greater offline and online interactions, and that users add contacts primarily due to proximity (i.e. they know each other in real life and have encountered before). These results can form the stepping stone to creating a user behavior model for offline and online.