Posts by David Schatsky from June 10, 2008

David Schatsky | June 10, 2008, 09:15 AM
Mining Cellphone Data to Derive Global Social Networks

In today's WSJ, an interesting review of recent research using cell phone, Web browsing and e-mail traffic to chart the depth of connections among individuals in different locations. For example, according to a recent study, in the Flushing section in the New York City borough of Queens, almost 12% of all electronic traffic wen to Seoul and 9% went to Porto in Portugal.

The article quoted quoted MIT's Carlo Ratti, who directed one of the studies, as saying, "You can take information from the cellphone network and see how the city lives and how it moves. It's a bit like globalization in real time."