A mobile diary

Filed in archive Science , Technology on August 3, 2005

Wired reports about the reality mining cell phone project @ MIT. This report really fits with my "Pervasive Computing with mobiles (part I, II & III) series."

Some notes I found remarkable:
- Cell phones know whom you called and which calls you dodged, but they can also record where you went, how much sleep you got and predict what you're going to do next
- eagle's Reality Mining project logged 350,000 hours of data over nine months about the location, proximity, activity and communication of volunteers
- Given enough data, Eagle's algorithms were able to predict what people -- especially professors and Media Lab employees -- would do next and be right up to 85 percent of the time.
- Eagle is already in talks with a large networking company that is interested in handing out phones to its employees to learn how its organization really works, compared with how the company's organizational chart says it works. (this is more than interesting for knowledge management and organization theory, because you can track and later manage the informal flow of information!)
- Eagle acknowledges that the project raises some important questions about privacy and about the ownership of data, but says people should feel empowered, not scared, by his cell-phone applications.