Current Trends in Reality Mining

We live in a technology driven society where, each one of us continuously leaves digital traces behind. Our mobile phones, for example, continuously sense our movements and interactions. This sociogeographic data could be continuously captured by millions of people around the world and promises to reveal important behavioral clues about humans. Mining patterns of human behavior from large-scale mobile phone data has deep potential impact on society. Reality Mining, pioneered by Nathan Eagle and Alex Pentland, (Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)) is defined as the study of human social behavior based on wireless mobile phone sensed data. Reality mining is based on data collected by sensors in mobile phones, cars, security cameras, RFID ('smart card') readers, and others, all allow for the measurement of human physical and social activity. Applications of reality mining are in diverse fields like epidemiology, psychology, urban planning, security, marketing and even analysis of poverty. This paper attempts to overview and analyzes the current trends in reality mining. It also presents the current challenges in this field.