Reality Mining

Despite having a history of social science that spans several decades, we still have a relatively poor understanding of why humans behave the way they do.

Reality Mining is a project developed at MIT and Nokia, that defines the collection of machine-sensed environmental data pertaining to human social behavior. This new paradigm of data mining makes possible the modeling of conversation context, proximity sensing, and temporospatial location throughout large communities of individuals. Mobile phones (and similarly innocuous devices) are used for data collection, opening social network analysis to new methods of empirical stochastic modeling.

Links:

Reality Mining Project (MIT Media Lab)

Human Dynamics Group (MIT Media Lab)

Sociable Media Group (MIT Media Lab)

Danah Boyd Danah's blog Secure ID (Danah is a PhD student on online social networks)