Research Group Projects and Descriptions

Wearable computing and sensing is now ubiquitous: smart phones are everywhere. The Human Dynamics group asks how we can make them socially aware, to move beyond IM, MMS, and Friendster and directly support building social groups, including friends, families, and business organizations. Our initial projects have already demonstrated potential to revolutionize social environments, and dramatically improve the competitiveness of companies.

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 solve 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, 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.

We are mining and modeling complex social systems using mobile devices. We want to quantify the affect of social signals, social and physical context, and content metadata on face-to-face interaction and sharing of media content. By understanding an individual’s social behavior, we can provide feedback for improved interaction and collaboration; auto-infer privacy and sharing privileges; and suggest paths for widespread distribution within the media network.