Designing a Mobile Music Sharing System Based on Emergent Properties by Maria Håkansson, Mattias Jacobsson, Lars Erik Holmquist (Future Applications Lab, Viktoria Institute, Sweden), short paper for the conference on Intelligent User Interfaces. It discusses a system for autonomous sharing of music files on mobile devices:
In our approach, songs are treated as individual agents that act autonomously according to input (e.g. listening habits) and given rules.introduce new music based on peoples’ shared music interest. (...) Imagine that you carry a mobile device that has the ability to store and play back music files, e.g. a mobile phone with an MP3 player. As you encounter various people, the devices you are carrying connect to each other, e.g. via Bluetooth. Media agents from other nearby devices check the status of your media collection. Based on what you have been listening to in the past and which files you already own, some other music might spontaneously “jump” from another device to yours (and vice versa), on its own accord. Later, when you listen to your jazz songs, the system also plays a newly obtained Frank Sinatra tune that you had not heard before.
Why do I blog this? this is a clever design, it may be great if there is a critical mass of users.