Reality Commons

brought to you by the MIT Human Dynamics Lab

Reality Mining Dataset

This dataset was collected in 2004 by Nathan Eagle and Alex Pentland. The citation for this data set is:

The goal of this experiment was to explore the capabilities of the smart phones that enabled social scientists to investigate human interactions beyond the traditional survey based methodology or the traditional simulation base methodology. The subjects were 75 students or faculty in the MIT Media Laboratory, and 25 incoming students at the MIT Sloan business school adjacent to the Media Laboratory. Of the 75 Media Lab participants, 20 were incoming masters students and 5 were incoming MIT freshman, and the rest had remained in the Media Lab for at least a year.

According to our knowledge, the Reality Mining experiment conducted in 2004 was the first to study community dynamics by tracking a sufficient amount people with their personal mobile phones and resulted in the first mobile data set with rich personal behavior and interpersonal interactions. Prior to this experiment, cell phones were not powerful enough to track people.