NPR Science Friday: Data Mining in the Mobile World

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If you have a smartphone in your pocket right now, think about how much it knows about you and how much your phone company could learn from it. The phone's GPS tells it where it is every night, which is probably where you live. The GPS capability could track your movements to the city. Matched with timestamps, you could possibly - it's possible to see how fast you're traveling. And if you're walking or driving or riding a bus, it could even tell others which congested highways to avoid from your unfortunate vantage point, being right there in the congestion.

Of course, we've all been there and done that, and we just heard from Sid talk about how, you know, these folks twittering about - using your GPS to tell folks where the earthquake is happening.

Well, computer scientists are thinking big thoughts about what else they could do. What could they do with all that crowdsource data? That's a new term, I think, that's entering the lexicon: crowdsourced data. So keep your ears open for it and ways to make all that real-time information more useful to you and to everyone else. And not just mapping traffic patterns across the Bay Bridge, but monitoring air pollution all over the city, providing better health care to patients.

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Tom, give us some idea of some of the potential that this allows us, what potential openings we have to use this data.

Dr. MITCHELL: Well, there are several already in use. You mentioned, for example, using cell phone GPS data to monitor traffic congestion, which could have a huge impact in terms of pollution, congestion, productivity, traffic.

But one of my favorites these days that's in use is the Google Flu Trends site. What they do there is they just capture the search queries that millions of us make to Google, and they look for search queries that seem to be related to influenza-like symptoms. So if you, you know, search for the nearest pharmacy, for example.

And they monitor that and digest that into a summary, which turns out to be a pretty good reflection of the influenza outbreak frequency that the CDC reports. And, in fact...

Listen and read the transcript at

www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121615586

More info at

www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200912182

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