Nathan Eagle videos

[gusl]

At the SFI Summer School, Nathan Eagle gave two awesome lectures on "reality mining" ("ubiquitous sensing"), namely about tracking people's location through GPS on the cell phones. His datasets include the majority of the population of whole countries.

The implications are huge, and possible applications include: tracking economic activity, social activity, tracing the source of epidemics, crime.

I caught parts of them on video.

On the second video, 11:25, he also mentions the IMMI Media Monitoring System, which turns on the microphone on phones (which people explicitly signed up for), to track media consumption.

Video 1
Video 2

Comments

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

They have datasets of GPS data including the majority of the population of some countries? That sounds likely to violate a lot of laws, since I don't expect there are any countries where a majority of people have signed up for Google latitude or something similar.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

I don't know the legal details of this stuff. Also remember that the data is anonymized.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

No GPS data for people who didn't give consent: all they have is tower data.

This means that for whole populations, tower data is all they have.

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

That makes more sense.