Reality Mining
What does your cell phone know about you? Well, a fair bit according to researchers at MIT. For instance, they claim they can divine, among other things:
- how happy and productive you are
- your social status
- your social group
Fundamentally this is just an extension of any form of data mining – take a large amount of data, and try and make some determinations from it. The examples based on social group and status can be fairly easily explained – by where you spend your time (the types of shop, street, district), and other mobile phones that yours tends to hang out with. Happiness and productivity was a correlation they discovered when they combined location and call data with questionnaires.
The same group are doing some interesting work with other areas that use mobile data – such as “social serendipity” – trying to match users that happen to be in similar locations, and that have similar profiles or interests. People have tried to release products into that space for as long as I can remember, but no-one’s yet cracked it, so it will be interesting to see if this research helps.
A lot of reality mining to date has been to do with mobiles (like BlueTooth MyBlogLog), but obviously anything that can sense us and feed data about us will add to this: cars, PCs, toasters… The more, to my mind, the merrier.
