A virtual counselor for online social networks (or did I really want to send you my post?)

It is well established by the scientific literature that a great part of Face-to-Face communication occurs at a non verbal level and also that this is partly obfuscated when the interaction takes place by Computer-Mediated-Communication (CMC). Fully aware we are simplifying the subject, we can say that the communication satisfies the need of humans to share their emotional experiences. Thus we can say that also the formulation and interpretation of messages exchanged in CMC is influenced by the emotions. Moreover the reduced physical presence in CMC implies a lack of social norms or social control which is amplified in the Online Social Networks (OSN) scenario. Motivated by these naïve considerations and the massive use of OSN, we introduce a Virtual Counselor as a contribution, from a technical point of view, to augment the quality of communication among users of OSN. The implementation of this Virtual Counselor is based on technologies by now mature like wearable devices to measure physical parameters, on artificial emotional intelligence, and on interactive tutoring systems, strongly used in online learning environments. We propose an abstract model of the communication scenario in OSN containing the Virtual Counselor to help the interpretation of the messages and of the emotional states in order to improve the communication among parties. The goal is to align the emotional states of senders and receivers to form dynamic groups of target friends in the OSN to send the posts to. The dynamism of the groups is both spatial (that is the composition of receivers can change for a given sender and a given message) and temporal (for example the sending of a message can be postponed in time). We think that this model is the basis for defining a new class of tools to improve the communication in OSN.