Briefs

MIT researcher Nathan Eagle is helping mobile phones get to know you better than you know yourself.

How much does your phone know about your life? Perhaps enough to predict your behavior and even match you up with a mate, says Nathan Eagle, a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab. As part of the Reality Mining project, Eagle has collected approximately 40 years of continuous data on human behavior by capturing communication, proximity, location and activity information from 100 cell phone-wielding subjects at his school. Hidden in that data are insights about complex social systems that could affect our relationships with our mobile phones and each other.

TheFeature: What is Reality Mining?

Eagle: We're at a point where we have the potential to capture an enormous amount of data on everyday human life, on the reality of our behaviors. Traditionally, that kind of data is collected through self-reported surveys or sociologists' observations. But now we can gather much more objective data on human behavior.

TheFeature: What new functionalities are enabled by this data?

Eagle: We can do behavior prediction. Depending on the life you lead, I can predict what you're going to do next based on very limited information. Whether it's your morning Starbucks fix or your Saturday afternoon softball game, everyone lives life in routines. One of our algorithms extracts these routine patterns from everyone's daily lives.

Reality Mining is the basis for Serendipity system (www.mobule.com).

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