Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Reality Mining

TechReview has this post on how data gathered by mobile phones can be used to learn about human behavior:

Every time you use your mobile phone, you leave behind a few bits of information. Some people are nervous about trailing digital bread crumbs behind them. However, MIT professor of media arts and sciences Sandy ­Pentland, would like to see phones collect even more information about their users, recording everything from their physical activity to their conversational cadences. Pentland, who has been sifting data gleaned from mobile devices for a decade, calls the practice "reality mining." ­Pentland and his group showed that mobile-phone data enabled them to accurately model the social networks of about 100 MIT students and professors.

Read more - 'Reality Mining'
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