July 25, 2005 | Your Phone is Smarter than You Are

Technology has only just recently made it easy to search our own personal computers, but soon, we may have ways to search our own lives as recorded by our cell phones.

Nathan Eagle of MIT's Media Lab shows how it might be done.

Cell phones know whom you called and which calls you dodged, but they can also record where you went, how much sleep you got and predict what you're going to do next.

At least, these are the capabilities of 100 customized phones given to students and employees at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- and they may be coming soon to your cell phone.

The phones were part of a Ph.D. project by MIT Media Lab researcher Nathan Eagle, who handed out the devices as a way to document the lives of students and employees of MIT, ranging from first-year undergrads and MBA students to Media Lab employees and professors.

Eagle's Reality Mining project logged 350,000 hours of data over nine months about the location, proximity, activity and communication of volunteers, and was quickly able to guess whether two people were friends or just co-workers. It also found that MBA students actually do spend $45,000 a year to build monster Rolodexes, and that first-year college students -- even those who attend MIT -- lead chaotic lives.

He and his team were able to create detailed views of life at the Media Lab, by observing how late people stayed at the lab, when they called one another and how much sleep students got.

Given enough data, Eagle's algorithms were able to predict what people -- especially professors and Media Lab employees -- would do next and be right up to 85 percent of the time.

Find more in today's Wired News here.

I've mostly forgotten all my friend's phone numbers now that my cell phone stores them for me.

In the future, will I forget where I've been since my phone will remember it?

Posted by Ryan Singel at July 25, 2005 03:52 PM

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