Reality Mining

An emerging area of research should help tracking the real social interactions of people - the so-called “Reality Mining”. With Reality Mining the “stupid” IT infrastructure gets automatically taught about our social behaviour.

Functioning
With a variety of sensors, each person carries around, data gets collected. Using Reality Mining, patterns in our life are detected. This information is used by the IT systems for different things. So it should be possible to share specifically information with other persons, or notice them that we are in their vicinity, and much more.

With cell phone already possible today
Is Bluetooth activated, the phone could recognize other devices or could be “seen” from those. If these data gets recorded, the system knows with what frequency the phone of another person is found.
The iPhone also has a built in acceleration meter. So the system knows whether one sits or moves. The microphone in a cell phone could be used to analyze our voice, or how long a person speaks.

Impact on the office work
Using Reality Mining in organizations and companies, it is possible to analyze group behaviour. It is conceivable that with the help of this data, the cooperation and the work efficiency of employees could be improved. But Reality Mining is also useful for new approaches, for example with spam mail filters. Messages from people that I have never met in real could get filtered. The system would almost fall back on the experience that you gathered in real life.

Data protection concerns
Using Reality Mining the world gets much more transparent. In any case it has to be ensured that data is used, but not abused. A possible approach could be that the user of such a service itself decides when and what is being recorded.

A detailed interview with MIT professor Sandy Pentland, who coined the term Reality Mining, could be found at Technology Review.