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Mobile Research Maps Friend Networks

Posted on: Tuesday, 18 August 2009, 06:13 CDT

According to a new report, friendships can be inferred from call records and the proximity of users with 95 percent accuracy.

The report, which is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, gathered data from 94 mobile users, and showed that workers with friends near work were happier, and those who called friends while on the job were less satisfied.

The data also showed a contrast with the answers given by the users themselves.

"We gave out a set of phones that were installed with a piece of 'uber-spyware'," said the study's lead author Nathan Eagle of the Santa Fe Institute.

"It's invisible to the user but logs everything: communication, users' locations, people’s proximity by doing continuous Bluetooth scans," he told BBC News.

Researchers compared the data with the results of a survey given to the users and found that the users reported different behavior than the data revealed.

"What we found was that people's responses were wildly inaccurate," Dr. Eagle said.

"For people who said that a given individual was a friend, they dramatically overestimated the amount of time they spent. But for people who were not friends, they dramatically underestimated that amount of time," he added.

Researchers were able to tell which pairs of users were friends by the mobile data alone. 

They were 95 percent accurate.

The proximity of a user to a friend, which was maximized if they worked together, correlated to users who reported satisfaction at work.

Those who only made calls to their friends while working had low levels of satisfaction at work.

Due to the small sample size and the lack of diversity in the sample (all were students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology); some are questioning what the results mean to sociology.

Currently, researchers are completing a larger study in Helsinki, Finland that will be comprised of 1,000 people, and another study in Kenya that ranges from computer science students to those who have never used a phone before.

Dr. Eagle sees the phone studies as a supplement to traditional measures.

"Mobile phone data are fantastic complements to the existing, very deep survey literature that the social sciences already have," he said.

Dr. Eagle also sees the studies as a means to map networks of friends to study the spread of disease and the design of urban spaces.

"We were capturing data when the Red Sox won the World Series for the first time. Suddenly all our subjects became unpredictable; they all flooded into downtown Boston to a rally in the centre of the city,” Eagle said.

"City planners approached us because they wanted to know how people were using urban infrastructure, to know when the people left the rally, how many walked across the bridge and how many took the subway, how many biked or took the bus.”

"We can give them some real insight with the idea of helping them build a better city that reflects people's actual behavior," Eagle added.

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On the Net:

• Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
• Santa Fe Institute

Source: redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports

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