As
highlighted in MIT Technology Review,1 every day each one of us lays down a voluminous trail of
data that results from our use of e-mail, instant messaging, cell phones,
Global Positioning Systems, WiFi, social networks, and other bits of modern
technology that track other activities.
Google
keeps its search data virtually forever, along with the IP address — and
therefore the identity — of the person making the search. Every time we travel
a toll road with a transponder to pay the toll, a record of our travels is left
behind, and of course, credit cards and debit cards compile a dossier of our
economic activity. With the advent of RFID tags, even more and finer-grained
data is being added to the mix.
For
some time now, scientists have been pondering what use all of this data could
be put to, and now a recent research paper published in the journal Science2 gives us a glimpse of the future in that
regard. The technology is called “reality mining,” and it represents the
convergence of the “Internet of things” with “data mining.”
The
“Internet of things” refers to the embedded, online capability to track almost
everything that happens everywhere, using RFID tags and embedded processors.
“Data
mining” involves applying special algorithms to enormous data sets in order to
discover hidden patterns and relationships.
By
combining these two resources, “reality mining” promises to help us predict
such things as:
“How
a disease epidemic spreads and how to stop it” or “What effects we’ll see from
billions of people in China and India using the Internet.”
Needless
to say, advertisers and marketers, not to mention the military and law
enforcement agencies, are extremely interested in this powerful new research
tool. Cell phone providers are already finding business partners who want to
target sales messages based on where a person is and what sort of calls he
makes, as well as the uses to which he puts his wireless Internet connection on
such devices as the iPhone.
One
example of how this new technology will work involves tracking the movement of
people on a large scale...
