
I'll be giving a brief talk about our recent
Reality Mining work at at
Forum Nokia's Developer day in Budapest on November 19th. I'll overview how we've used mobile phones to continuously gather information including proximity, location, and communication from thousands of people around the world. Systematic measurements from these people over many months has generated some of the largest datasets of continuous human behavior ever collected, representing over one million hours of daily activity. Additionally, in collaboration with several European and African telecommunication companies, I am currently analyzing the call logs of entire countries - dynamic social networks consisting of up to 250 million nodes (phone numbers) and 12 billion temporal edges (phone calls).
In this talk I describe how this type of data can be used to uncover the structure in behavior of both individuals and organizations, infer relationships, and study social network dynamics. By combining theoretical models with rich and systematic measurements, I hope to demonstrate the possibility of gaining insight into the underlying behavior of complex social systems.
While results such as uncovering scaling laws from the communication patterns of hundreds of millions of people will certainly be one emphasis in this talk, of equal importance is how this data can enable applications that improve people's lives. I will demonstrate a variety ways these insights into our own behaviors can be used to develop applications that better support both the individual, organization and society.
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