IoT-enabled social relationships meet artificial social intelligence

With the recent advances of the Internet of Things (IoT), and the increasing accessibility to ubiquitous computing resources and mobile devices, the prevalence of rich media contents, and the ensuing social, economic, and cultural changes, computing technology and applications have evolved quickly over the past decade. They now go beyond personal computing, facilitating collaboration and social interactions in general, causing a quick proliferation of social relationships among IoT entities. The increasing number of these relationships and their heterogeneous social features have led to computing and communication bottlenecks that prevent the IoT network from taking advantage of these relationships to improve the offered services and customize the delivered content, known as social relationships explosion. On the other hand, the quick advances in artificial intelligence applications in social computing have led to the emerging of a promising research field known as artificial social intelligence (ASI) that has the potential to tackle the social relationships explosion problem. This article discusses the role of IoT in social relationships management, the problem of social relationships explosion in IoT, and reviews the proposed solutions using ASI, including social-oriented machine-learning and deep-learning techniques.