If your cell phone knew what you were going to do at two o'clock, would that change how you planned your day? If your cell phone "predicted" correctly where you would be at a particular time of the week, how would you feel? No longer hypothetical situations, the Reality Mining experiment answers these questions. Headed by Nathan Eagle, the Reality Mining experiment was designed to more precisely determine how people spent a period of time by tracking their daily cell phone usage. The academic research project was performed at the MIT Media Laboratory from August 2004 through January 2005. It takes advantage of the increasingly widespread use of mobile phones to provide insight into the dynamics of both individual and group behavior. By leveraging machine learning, the Reality Mining experiment is creating models that can be used to predict what a single user will do next, as well as model behavior of large organizations. Eagle and his team handed out 100 Nokia 6600 cell phones to MIT students and faculty and, using censors in the phone with information gathered from cell phone towers, were able to predict a user's location, based on phone usage over the course of six months.
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