About

The understanding of ways with which people communicate and interact in their real (offline) and virtual (online) life can offer valuable knowledge for the developing of new services and for the improving of social communications. This project proposal entitled “REVITAL : Real and Virtual Social Interactions: Crossroads and Reciprocities” had as its main objective to promote research on cross-discipline innovative methodologies for analyzing emotional information extracted from people's virtual and real social life. This is important nowadays since social networks play a crucial role in everyday life and discovering specific patterns among real and virtual lives can be beneficial for social interactions and for new more innovative services and applications. REVITAL's aim is to address important issues in such today’s reality in relevance to online and offline activities' commonalities and diversities. In this context, in REVITAL we studied how social media activities reflects on real life social networking actions, we looked for patterns in social media interactions triggered by real life emotional states and we searched for potential reciprocal implications among such social and real life actions.

Our approach

• Data Collection: monitoring of users' activity on Facebook social network (online activities) and developemtn of web and mobile applications for collecting data from users’ real life activities.
• Online activities analysis: users' Facebook data have been analyzed with affective analysis methodologies (i.e. lexicon-based and machine learning approaches) to monitor changes of people’s emotions over time.
• Offline activities analysis: recognition and analysis of affective patterns in real social interactions.
• Data integration: comparison of users' affective experience in their online and offline social activities.