Reality Mining and Reality Trails
Reality mining, he says, “is all about paying attention to patterns in life and using that information to help [with] things like setting privacy patterns, sharing things with people, notifying people–basically, to help you live your life.”
To me, until it’s doing this, a Personal Digital Assistant is simply a Personal Data Container.
In a paper published last May, Pentland and his group showed that cell-phone data enabled them to accurately model the social networks of about 100 MIT students and professors. They could also precisely predict where subjects would meet with members of their networks on any given day of the week.
…and remind you to ask them that question you put in earlier.
For now, though, Pentland is excited about the potential of reality mining to simplify people’s lives. “All of the devices that we have are completely ignorant of the things that matter most,” he says. “They may know all sorts of stuff about Web pages and phone numbers. But at the end of the day, we live to interact with other people. Now, with reality mining, you can see how that happens … it’s an interesting God’s-eye view.”
This is what’s coming, and I am so excited for it.