25c3: Mining social contacts with active RFID (English)

The SocioPatterns project aims to shed light on patterns and statistical regularities in social dynamics. To date, little quantitative information is available about these patterns, and measuring real-world dynamics is indispensable for obtaining a complete picture.... This allows, for example, to discriminate who is talking with whom in a small crowded room. In this talk we discuss our implementation of the contact detection firmware for OpenBeacon tags. We provide some details on data analysis and on the visualization of the longitudinal contact networks we measure. We report the results of an experiment involving about 100 people at a conference, and discuss some interesting statistical regularities of social contact. We also discuss how contact information and trajectory similarity can be used to infer the structure of the social network underlying the community of monitored persons, and how background information can be integrated into this picture. We close by pointing to future directions for research as well as to mashups with social networking services.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3-1O3Vg8cE