Human Dynamics

Today people leave digital breadcrumbs wherever they go, through smart phones, RFIDs, and more. The Human Dynamics group uses Reality Mining to ask how we can use this data to better organize companies, public health, and governance, by better understanding how social networks influence people when they make decisions, transmit information, adopt new technologies, or change behaviors. Our projects have already demonstrated the potential to dramatically improve the competitiveness of companies, and hint at the ability to revolutionize social environments.

Sensible Organizations

Data mining of email has provided important insights into how organizations function and what management practices lead to greater productivity. But important communications are almost always face-to-face, so we are missing the greater part of the picture. Today people carry cell phones and wear RFID badges. These body-worn sensor networks mean that we can potentially know who talks to whom, and even how they talk to each other. As a consequence, we can finally answer questions like: Does the sales department talk to marketing? Are all these meetings really useful? Does the boss really talk all the time or does it just seem like it? Sensible Organizations will investigate how new technologies for sensing human interaction can be used to reinvent organizations and management.

Sociometric Badges

We have manufactured several hundred sociometric badges and used them in real organizations to automatically measure individual and collective patterns of behavior, predict human behavior from unconscious social signals, identify social affinity among individuals working in the same team, and enhance social interactions by providing real-time feedback.

Other Research Interests

• Wearable computing
• Machine learning
• Pattern recognition
• Unsupervised learning
• Context-aware computing
• Social network analysis
• Pervasive computing
• Signal processing
• Electronic design
• Sensor technologies