Social life networks: a multimedia problem?

Connecting people to the resources they need is a fundamental task for any society. We present the idea of a technology that can be used by the middle tier of a society so that it uses people's mobile devices and social networks to connect the needy with providers. We conceive of a world observatory called the Social Life Network (SLN) that connects together people and things and monitors for people's needs as their life situations evolve. To enable such a system we need SLN to register and recognize situations by combining people's activities and data streaming from personal devices and environment sensors, and based on the situations make the connections when possible. But is this a multimedia problem? We show that many pattern recognition, machine learning, sensor fusion and information retrieval techniques used in multimedia-related research are deeply connected to the SLN problem. We sketch the functional architecture of such a system and show the place for these techniques.