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JT: In a future world where this is more pervasive and available rather than being a one-shot, how would you see urban planners and governments using this data?

AV: Well, for the urban planners, there is a big, big revolution going on. What happens today is that policies and plans are thought by assumptions. And their effects and imports can be evaluated only after a long time that they are implemented because, again as it was seen before, gathering this information is expensive. It's costly. It's cumbersome. So it's really impossible to get this information in real-time. What is going to happen is that instead of planning the city, the urban planners would actually have to program the city, to configure [it] in real-time because information will flow in real-time. So if you change the direction of the one-way road, you will see almost immediately what the effect on traffic is. If you close an area to cars, you can see immediately what will happen into the mobility in general. And if you create public spaces in a place rather than another, you will see immediately how people will react to that.

Well, basically, our major datasets are on one side cell phone activity and on the other side, Flickr pictures. They are not the only ones of course. But they are the two best examples of what we call digital shadows and digital footprints. Digital shadows are all of those data that are gathered by the interaction and conscious interactions of the user with pervasive systems. Digital footprints, on the other side, are explicitly released information about the behavior of citizens in the city. Flickr pictures are publically available online.

And a good deal of those is available and geotagged. So you can download them and see where they were taken. Since you know also the user that took them and you know, for example, his or her nationality, you can really see how people flow within a specific area from the level of the nation to the level of a city, back down to the level of a specific area within the city. And you can see where most of the pictures are taken: what are the hotspots, what kind of temporal signature is in specific place so whether tourists go more in the morning or in the afternoon.

And more interestingly, you can see flows. You can see where people go to take a picture first and where they go next. And all of these places are interconnected with each other.

What do you want your cell phone to be able to do?

Massachusetts Industry of Technology professor Hal Abelson put that question to about 20 computer science students this semester when he gave them one assignment: Design a software program for cell phones that use Google Inc.'s upcoming Android mobile operating system.

The professor, who is from the Netherlands, said that teaching a required course in introductory physics to M.I.T. students made him realize “that what really counts is to make them love physics, to make them love science.”

He said he spent 25 hours preparing each new lecture, choreographing every detail and stripping out every extra sentence.

“Clarity is the word,” he said.

Fun also matters.