A View from David Talbot Released: A Trove of Data-Mining Research from Phones At conference starting Wednesday, huge trove of research papers point to enormous possibilities, but privacy issues remain. Cell phones generate tremendous amounts of human mobility and other data that can be particularly useful in the developing world to redesign transportation networks (see African Bus Routes Redrawn Using Cell-Phone Data ) and provide a boon to epidemiology (see Big Data from Cheap Phones ).911-essay Ahead of a conference on the topic that starts Wednesday at MIT, a motherlode of research has been made public about how to use this data. For the past year, researchers around the world responded to a challenge dubbedВ Data for Development. in which the telecom giant Orange released 2.5 billion records from five million cell-phone users in Ivory Coast.
В A compendium of this work is the D4D book. holding all 850 pages of the submissions. The larger conference, called NetMob (now in its third year), also features papers based on cell phone data from other regions, described in thisВ book of abstracts. В Amid all the excitement about this growing field, one issue hasnt be resolved: how to use data held by mobile carriers without violating the privacy of the phone owners. The D4D records, for example, were reworked to try to prevent anyone identifying the users, but there is no widely accepted way of doing this, and such projects are still on-off efforts. But at least for now we can bask in the promising research at theВ conference .В Tagged Im MIT Technology Review s senior writer, interested in a wide range of topics including climate change, energy, and information and communication technologies.
Recent projects have included traveling to China to write about GMO crop More development there, and Germany to explore how theyll try to ramp up renewable power while closing down nuclear plants. My 2008 feature on the Obama campaigns social-networking operation was selected for The Best Technology Writing 2009 . Subscribe to Continue Reading Uh oh you’ve read all five of your free articles for this month. Become an Insider for unlimited access to online stories for less than $2 per month. Insider Online Only $19.95/yr US PRICE See international, alumni and other pricing options Mobile How ubiquitous information and communication are transforming our lives. Connected Toys Are Raising Complicated New Privacy Questions Toys and other devices are collecting loads of data from children. What could go wrong? Nvidias Eye-Tracking Tech Could Revolutionize Virtual Reality A phenomenon first observed by Leonardo da Vinci is being used to make virtual images look more realistic. by Simon Parkin $32 Billion Buyout of ARM Is a Giant Bet on the Internet of Things The Japanese telecom and Internet company SoftBank is taking control of technology that powers most of the worlds mobile devices (and increasingly more aside from). courtesy of Jamie Condliffe
