N. Eagle and A. Pentland. Reality mining: Sensing complex social systems. Journal of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, June 2005. [url]

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This paper report the analysis of the mobile usage patterns of 100 users which have been loged during the period of 9 months. The subjects were equipped with a mobile phone hacked with a logging software (the same of the context project of the university of helsinki) that could record all the activity on the phone, plus the bluetooth proxemics with other devices and the cell id information.

The authors developed two techniques of datamining with complex method, namely a hidden Markov Model and a Gaussian mixture model, using which they obtained interesting results in patter recognition.

One of the interesting results was the ability to stimulate serendipidity of encounters, informing the users of the structure of the other’s pattern of interaction. The authors rely in this a great value for collaborative work.

Overall the paper contains a good overview of the statistical methods used to analyse and infer the pattern from the dataset.