Prof. Monica Lam

"How Mobile Disrupts and Opens Up Social as We Know It"

(Vortrag im Rahmen der "Distinguished Lecture Series" des "Max Planck Instituts für Software-Systeme")

Being a personal device that is constantly online, the mobile device will revolutionize social computing. We will be able to share multimedia and interact freely with any of our different circles of friends, colleagues, and families, without being confined to closed proprietary social networks and without having our communication intermediated by third-parties. We believe this openness will lead to an explosion of social apps in new categories including health, finance, and corporate.

We have started the revolution with the first of such a system called Musubi. Musubi is a real-time, multimedia group chat app that allows users to control all their data. It is also an open app platform that lets apps be easily created and spread virally among friends. Musubi is built on top of an egocentric social platform where identity-based cryptography is used to allow individuals communicate securely with each other without the friction of key exchange. It provides an innovative identity firewall that supports social apps without users giving up friends' data to the app creators.

Musubi Beta and a number of social apps are already available in the Google Play Store. We invite you to give us feedback on the apps and to join us in creating an open mobile social internet.

Bio: Monica S. Lam has been a Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University since 1988, and the Faculty Director of the Stanford MobiSocial Computing Laboratory. She received her PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. Her current research interest is in creating open social computing platforms. She has worked in the areas of high-performance computing, computer architecture, compiler optimizations, security analysis, and virtualization-based computer management. She is a co-author of the "Dragon book" and the founding CEO of MokaFive, a desktop virtualization company started by her research group. Monica is an ACM Fellow.