Re: Can someone summarize Nathan Eagle's points?

Done.  I've added a concise summary, from my notes.

http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/socialweb/wiki/InvitedGuestSummaries

A slightly longer version:

We were fortunate enough to have a fascinating tele conference with
guest speaker, Nathan Eagle [1], during which, we covered a number of
topics ranging from the details of his MIT study on "Reality Mining"
[2] in mobile phones, to challenges facing Internet usage in the
developing world, to the aspects of privacy, analysis and
standardization of data gathering and exchange in the mobile phone
sector.  Nathan has worked in a number of places around the world,
including in East Africa hacking together mobile phone projects such
TextEagle [3] and MIT where he received his PhD in 2005.

Looking at the big picture, Nathan recounted his extensive experiences
from around the world, and was quick to point out that there is a vast
discrepancy between mobile phone usage in the developed world, and
that in the developing.  For example, most of the mobile phones in the
world (c. 2.5 billion) are on a prepay package which is enormously
expensive in local terms.   This is one reason, that the average
duration of a call in Africa is about 3 seconds.  When in Africa he
was often asked by the local population whether they should get
"internet" on their mobiles, and his answer was invariably "no", as
the cost would not justify the value added.  The way he described it
was that, "the rates are the highest, for the people least able to
pay".  He suggested that enabling affordable Internet around the world
was by far a more important goal than standardization of data formats,
and that the latter could follow on from the former.  To enable the
developing world to participate in the social web, pressure needs to
be applied to telcos to make access affordable.

Moving on to the developed world, Nathan was asked how difficult it
was to get your full data traces (Call Detail Record (CDR) [4])from
using a mobile phone.  His answer was, that if you are a startup or
individual, it is practically impossible.  The exception to this is,
governments, however, are able to subpoena this data, for example, to
find out if you were are a crime scene.  Telcos have the view that the
data they own, and that is valuable.  However, it is very hard to
analyze even using super computers.  For this reasons programs such as
"Friends and Family" or "Fab 5" are used to mine data and
relationships further.  This trend he sees set to continue, with
telcos having a stronger grip on personal data, with the main real
counter balance regulating this being PR, and press reporting, such as
the NSA/AT&T case [5].

Regarding his own study at MIT in gathering data on mobile phones, it
was successful in a number of ways, in that that the data set has been
downloaded over 10,000 times, and had been used in over 150 subsequent
studies.  It was able to predict the nature of relationships (eg
friend vs colleague) in 96% of cases, the most useful datapoint being
bluetooth proximity data.  He said that data available on your mobile
is richer than that recorded by the telcos, but generally involved
installing spyware on the device.  In his case he had consent, which
was generally given quite freely.  Indeed, in another project, 85% of
people questions were prepared to have recoding data (including audio)
for the cost of free calls on the device.

However, the success of Nathan's study in mobile data mining, appears
to have been the exception, rather than the rule.  Many attempts have
been made in both industry and academia for the use of data gathering
and sharing, from the Nokia Scope project to the CrowdAdd project.
One reason he suggests that there has been a lack of success, in this
domain was that he feels the privacy issues have never been sorted out
universally.  Asked about the role of standardization in data formats,
such as ontologies, he said that they would be useful but in the near
term, other challenges such as affordable providing pricing schemes
for generating user generated content (eg such as job opportunities)
would have a much larger impact.

Nathan has also generously offered to answer questions on the mailing
list, and provide more details of his upcoming work.

[1] http://web.media.mit.edu/~nathan/
[2] http://reality.media.mit.edu/
[3] http://txteagle.com/
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_detail_record
[5] http://www.eff.org/nsa/faq

On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 6:30 PM, Harry Halpin<hhalpin@ibiblio.org> wrote:
> That would be great. Just add them to the wiki here:
>
> http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/socialweb/wiki/InvitedGuestSummaries
>
> Note that I summarized the Gypsi telecon. It doesn't have to be a huge
> summary, just a paragraph will do - it will be for the final report to
> the W3C.
>
> '''Sam Critchley from Gypsii - Meeting on
> [http://www.w3.org/2009/06/24-swxg-minutes.html July 22nd 2009] '''
>
> A number of businesses like <a href="http://www.gypsii.com/"> Gypsii
> are making their business off of context-aware mobile applications for
> social networking that make it easy for users to generate content.
> First, there is a real need to standardize context information.
> Second, they have to make their application for different phones, such
> as the iPhone and Windows Mobile. Lastly, they would like an easy to
> share data like phone numbers and while OpenID 2.0 can do this, it is
> not well-known how to do this in an extensible manner. <a
> href="http://www.perey.com/">Christine Perey</a> then hosted a
> discussion of standards for measuring social networks. As a social
> network is not just a web-site, the sheer number of accounts is not a
> great metric, as many people make an account but do not use it. What
> is needed is a metric of how much time a user spends on a social
> networking service, and how that changes over units of time. An
> ability to discover what components of a social web site a user spends
> the most time on would be ideal.  A simple standard for sharing this
> type of information from the W3C would help analysts and researchers
> interested in social networks.
>
>

Received on Wednesday, 26 August 2009 00:51:57 UTC