Iolanthe Chronis, Anmol Madan, Alex 'Sandy' Pentland

Abstract

We describe SocialCircuits, a platform capable of measuring the face-to-face and phone-based communication network of a realworld community. This platform uses commodity mobile phones to measure social ties between individuals, and uses long and short term surveys to measure the shifts in individual habits, opinions, health, and friendships influenced by those ties. We also describe the flagship experiment using this platform, a year-long study of an entire university undergraduate dormitory. Lastly, we discuss some of the key challenges we met in building and deploying the platform, including mobile phone hardware and software selection, privacy considerations, community selection and recruitment, and techniques for minimizing data loss.