Research Group Projects and Descriptions

Today people leave digital breadcrumbs wherever they go, through smart phones, RFIDs, and more. The Human Dynamics group uses Reality Mining to ask how we can use this data to better organize companies, public health, and governance, by better understanding how social networks influence people when they make decisions, transmit information, adopt new technologies, or change behaviors. Our projects have already demonstrated the potential to dramatically improve the competitiveness of companies, and hint at the ability to revolutionize social environments.

A swimming coach improves the technique of his swimmers by comparing them with master swimmers. In the same way, we can model and improve domain-specific individual/group skills with stochastic analysis, comparative study, and the signals that can be reliably detected using automated methods. We aim to make more competitive people, and happier and more efficient groups. We attain our goal by collecting together how a huge number of people solve different types of tasks, analyzing the signals in our collection, and advising people accordingly.

We are creating a Living Laboratory with the City of Boston, in order to develop and evaluate new digital services. Our initial focus is on financial literacy, mobile services, health, and 'crowdsourcing' for neighborhood services.

Meeting Mediator is a real-time, portable system that detects social interactions and provides persuasive feedback to enhance group collaboration. Social interactions are captured using sociometric badges, and are visualized on mobile phones to promote behavioral change. Particularly in distributed collaborations, MM attempts to bridge the gap among the distributed groups by detecting and communicating social signals.

We are examining mobile activity analysis for predicting group behavior, by analyzing all available behavioral traces. Potential applications include security, accountability, and ease-of-use of mobile financial transaction systems, as well as a deeper understanding of technology adoption and diffusion.

Every time you use your cell phone, you leave behind a few bits of information, and the newest smart phones can record everything from users' physical activity to their conversational cadences. People are—rightfully—nervous about trailing these sorts of digital bread crumbs behind them. But the same information could help to solve problems of identity theft and fraud by automatically determining security settings. More significantly, cell-phone data can shed light on workplace dynamics and on the well-being of communities. It could even help project the course of disease outbreaks and provide clues about individuals' health.

Alumni Contributor(s): Sumit Basu, Tanzeem Choudhury, Brian Clarkson, Nathan Eagle, Yuri Ivanov, Tony Jebara and Oliver Strimpel

Data mining of email has provided important insights into how organizations function and what management practices lead to greater productivity. But important communications are almost always face-to-face, so we are missing the greater part of the picture. Today, however, people carry cell phones and wear RFID badges. These body-worn sensor networks mean that we can potentially know who talks to whom, and even how they talk to each other. Sensible Organizations investigates how these new technologies for sensing human interaction can be used to reinvent organizations and management.

Cell phones and other embedded devices provide a great tool to sample the vicissitudes of urban life. In this project, we demonstrate how the tracking of about 200 delivery vehicles could reveal where people in a whole city go, when and where are the potential future traffic jams, and how people adjust their lives according to the economy.