Nathan Eagle

I am interested in exploring the capability of computers to anticipate human behavior. Much of my research involves applying machine learning and network analysis techniques to large human behavioral datasets collected from both the developed and developing worlds.

As a Research Scientist at MIT and now as an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, I am currently analyzing behavioral datasets that represent the social network topology and dynamics of entire countries. Coupling anonymized communication data involving hundreds of millions of unique phone numbers and tens of billions of phone calls with longitudinal data ranging from purchasing decisions and movement patterns to regional information about access to health care and socioeconomic status, my collaborators and I are developing algorithms that we hope will ultimately provide deeper insight into human societies.

My doctoral research at the MIT Media Lab used 100 mobile phones as behavioral sensors, programmed to continually log communication, movement, and proximate phones. The resultant 400,000 hours of behavioral data has generated almost 100 publications and provided insight into individuals' routines , relationships, and the underlying dynamics governing aggregate behavior. We have named this space Reality Mining and it was recently declared one of the '10 technologies most likely to change the way we live' by the MIT Technology Review magazine.

I have been a research faculty member at MIT between 2006-2009 while jointly serving as an Adjunct Professor at the GSTIT in Ethiopia and a Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Nairobi. A large portion of my time has been dedicated to creating an initiative called EPROM (Entrepreneurial Programming and Research on Mobiles), part of the MIT Program for Developmental Entrepreneurship. The project's aim has been to design a globally applicable mobile phone programming curriculum while fostering mobile phone-related research and entrepreneurship. To date, the EPROM curriculum is currently being taught within Computer Science departments in ten Sub-Saharan African countries.

My latest entrepreneurial project is a mobile mechanical turk: txteagle - an "artificial artificial intelligence" system enabling the 3 billion mobile phone subscribers living in the developing world to earn small amounts of money by completing short, SMS-based tasks. txteagle is currently being deployed in the Dominican Republic (through Viva) and Kenya (through Safaricom). Additional partnerships in Africa and South America will be announced later this year.