People and organizations, he said, are increasingly choosing to interact with one another through digital means that record traces of those interactions. “This allows scientists to study those interactions in ways that five years ago we never would have thought we could do,” he said.
ONCE based on networked personal computers, collective intelligence systems are increasingly being created to leverage wireless networks of digital sensors and smartphones. In one application, groups of scientists and political and environmental activists are developing “participatory sensing” networks.
This type of work with this interconnected network of cell phones, computer networks, and GPS networks creates a new discipline that Dr. Pentland calls "reality mining" -- in reality an extension of data mining tapping into public data.
Issues of privacy and control of one's personal data, and big-brother type surveillance become important, issues which Steve Steinberg articulates in his .CSV blog in April 08
This emerging area doesn’t have a catchy moniker yet, but you can think of it as an amalgamation of crowd theory, human terrain mapping, and social simulation. It is the science of groups; it is a new kind of quantitative political science.
The tools and theories needed to analyze social interactions are just now reaching the level of sophistication — in accuracy, in robustness – necessary to leave the lab and enter commercial duty. We are in a period analogous to the early 1970s, when developments like the Capital Asset Pricing Model and the Black-Scholes equation transformed finance, changing it from an art to a science, and opening enormous new markets in the process. Now, new equations describing “crowd dynamics” are about to change our lives. And not always for the better. This is one of the most significant technology trends I have seen in years; it may also be one of the most pernicious. (.CSV)
