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BOSTON (Feb. 18) -- Physicist Albert-L�szl� Barab�si can guess where you will be tomorrow at 3 p.m. And where you'll be Saturday night at 8. In fact, given enough data, he can predict your location at any time, with an average 93 percent accuracy. But don't worry. He's not watching you. In fact, his work shouldn't be cause for alarm so much as existential distress.
In a new paper published in the Feb. 19 issue of Science, (Limits of Predictability in Human Mobility, Chaoming Song, Zehui Qu, Nicholas Blumm, Albert-L�szl� Barab�si) the Northeastern University physicist and his colleagues describe how they used data from 50,000 anonymous cell phone users to study human mobility, or where we are and when. Their work reveals that our movements follow a pattern, whether we are homebodies or frequent fliers.
"The surprise was that we couldn't find unpredictable people," Barab�si says. "We are all boring."
Barab�si, who also explores these ideas in his forthcoming book, "Bursts," is a pioneer in the field of network science, which is effectively the academic version of the Kevin Bacon game -- it describes how seemingly disparate systems or entities are connected.
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