Synthia /Cell Phone as Oracle

Cynthia Payne - DANM 202 – Cultural Theory Cultural Presentation 2 - Mobilities Winter 2006

The Cell Phone as Oracle: The Reality Mining Experiment

The Reality Mining Experiment (RME) seems reminiscent of the movie, Minority Report: That human behavior can be predicted through the use of a device of some kind. The RME doesn’t use otherworldly seers as in the movie, but through people’s use of cell phones, they hope to be able to forecast people’s actions.

This references Rafael’s writing this week The Cell Phone and the Crowd and the desire of people to give voice to the voiceless – in the case of RME – giving a voice to people’s personal behavior. If the government had the tools of the RME, the coo in the Philippines might not have taken place at all. In the Bell writing RME relates to the reinscription of locative cell phone usage as a means to monitor and control one's personal life versus the more universal communication context originally intended.

There are many problems with gathering data on people based on their cell phone usage. Use of the term 'reality' in the name of this project implies that its data is 'the' reality and the only authentic interpretation. It is not just the methods by which the data is gathered through cell phone usage, but a question of whether this kind of data can be thought of as completely accurate and worthwhile for official use. Even in the field of social network analysis can this data really help to deepen human relations or is it yet another useless dataset?

http://reality.media.mit.edu/dataset.php

The Reality Mining Dataset The Reality Mining project represents the largest mobile phone experiment ever attempted in academia. An unprecedented amount of data on human behavior and group interactions that we plan on anonymizing and making available to the general academic community. By the end of the experiment, this dataset will contain over 500,000 hours (60 years) of continuous data on daily human behavior - revolutionize the field of social network analysis.

The research agenda takes advantage of the increasingly widespread use of mobile phones to provide insight into the dynamics of both individual and group behavior. By leveraging recent advances in machine learning generative models can be used to predict what a single user will do next, as well as model behavior of large organizations. Has captured communication, proximity, location, and activity information from 100 subjects at MIT over the course of the 2004-2005 academic year. This data represents over 350,000 hours (40 years) of continuous data on human behavior. Such rich data on complex social systems have implications for a variety of fields. The research questions we are addressing include: • Who will have access to the raw data and how be used? • How do social networks evolve over time? • How entropic (predictable) are most people's lives? • How does information flow? • Can the topology of a social network be inferred from only proximity data? • How can we change a group's interactions to promote better functioning? If you have a Nokia Symbian Series 60 Phone (such as the Nokia 6600) with a data plan, you can participate. Additionally, the cleaned 2004-2005 data of identifiable information, and both the mobile phone application and the resultant dataset can be downloaded here. This project was generously supported by Nokia. Of course. http://www.econtentmag.com/Articles/ArticleReader.aspx?ArticleID=14183&AuthorID=728 Headed by Nathan Eagle, the Reality Mining experiment was designed to more precisely determine how people spent a period of time by tracking their daily cell phone usage. Using censors in the phone with information gathered from cell phone towers, were able to predict a user's location, based on phone usage over the course of six months.