Multiple Media Outlets Cover Eric Paulos’s Research
In the Media
The Economist, Public Radio International and WBUR’s Here & Now have all written about HCII faculty Eric Paulos’s research on how mobile phones can be used as sensors for collecting information over broad geographic areas.
The Economist writes:
“IF YOUR mobile phone could talk, it could reveal a great deal. Obviously it would know many of your innermost secrets, being privy to your calls and text messages, and possibly your e-mail and diary, too. It also knows where you have been, how you get to work, where you like to go for lunch, what time you got home, and where you like to go at the weekend. Now imagine being able to aggregate this sort of information from large numbers of phones. It would be possible to determine and analyse how people move around cities, how social groups interact, how quickly traffic is moving and even how diseases might spread. The world’s 4 billion mobile phones could be turned into sensors on a global data-collection network.”
Public Radio International writes:
“Eric Paulos, assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute in Pittsburgh, wants to put tiny environmental sensors he hopes to implant in mobile phones soon. He wants people to become ‘citizen scientists,’ measuring things around them.”