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lampertina
Lampertina bookmarked on 2007-12-20 cell_phones mit_techreview sandy_pentland socialcomputing socialnetworks socialtheory

Sandy Pentland, professor of media arts and sciences at MIT, talks about "reality mining." Pay attention, interesting stuff!
- this is page 1 of a 2-page article

  • Based on phone calls and the devices' physical proximity to other people's phones (as measured by Bluetooth), Pentland and researcher Nathan Eagle developed social-network models that were more accurate and more nuanced than those constructed from the subjects' self-reports.
  • Sifting through cell-phone data to get at the truth of people's social interactions falls under the umbrella of an emerging field that Pentland has dubbed "reality mining." And he thinks that social networks are just the beginning. The same techniques can be applied to other sets of cell-phone data to help people communicate more effectively, manage their time better, and even make their neighborhoods more livable. And it's all thanks to the ubiquity of cell phones--the ultimate data-collection machines.
  • the generalization is that maybe it can know lots of things about you. Take your Facebook friends as an example. The phone could know which ones you socialize with in person, which ones are your work friends, and which friends you've never seen in your life. That's an interesting distinction, and reality mining can make it automatic.
    • lampertina
      Lampertina on 2007-12-20
      - and by making it automatic, you make part of an algorithm...
  • It's about making the "dumb" information-technology infrastructure know something about your social life. All this sort-of Web 2.0 stuff is nice, but you have to type stuff in. Things are never up to date, and unless you consciously know about something, you can't put it in. Reality mining is all about paying attention to patterns in life and using that information to help you do things like set privacy policies, share things with people, notify people when you're near them, and just to help you live your life.
  • Today's cell phones are on us all the time, and they come with hardware that can act as sensors for your environment. For instance, if Bluetooth is turned on, then the phone can see and be seen by other Bluetooth devices. You can start to make a record of the Bluetooth-enabled devices you encounter throughout the day. Then you can figure out, based on the frequency [with which] you encounter other people's Bluetooth phones, what sort of relationship you have with them.
    • lampertina
      Lampertina on 2007-12-20
      - I think I get it, although it does sound a bit strange to let a device figure out what kind of relationship I have with someone...!
  • And all phones have built-in microphones that can be used to analyze your tone of voice, how long you talk, how often you interrupt people. These patterns can tell you what roles people play in groups: you can figure out who the leader is and who the followers are. It's folk psychology, and some of the stuff people may already know, but we haven't been able to measure it, at such a large scale, before these phones.
    • lampertina
      Lampertina on 2007-12-20
      - ok, now it's starting to sound a bit creepy...

This link has been bookmarked by 1 people . It was first bookmarked on 20 Dec 2007, by Yule Heibel.

  • 20 Dec 07
    lampertina
    Yule Heibel

    Sandy Pentland, professor of media arts and sciences at MIT, talks about "reality mining." Pay attention, interesting stuff!
    - this is page 1 of a 2-page article

    cell_phones mit_techreview sandy_pentland socialcomputing socialnetworks socialtheory

    • Based on phone calls and the devices' physical proximity to other people's phones (as measured by Bluetooth), Pentland and researcher Nathan Eagle developed social-network models that were more accurate and more nuanced than those constructed from the subjects' self-reports.
    • Sifting through cell-phone data to get at the truth of people's social interactions falls under the umbrella of an emerging field that Pentland has dubbed "reality mining." And he thinks that social networks are just the beginning. The same techniques can be applied to other sets of cell-phone data to help people communicate more effectively, manage their time better, and even make their neighborhoods more livable. And it's all thanks to the ubiquity of cell phones--the ultimate data-collection machines.
    • 4 more annotations...

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