Drew Cogbill | Thesis Blog

works in progress.

Archive for the ‘Nathan Eagle’ tag

“Behavioral Inference Across Cultures: Using Telephones as a Cultural Lens”

without comments

Nathan Eagle’s paper “Behavioral Inference Across Cultures: Using Telephones as a Cultural Lens“, to appear in IEEE Intelligent systems, August 2008,  continues to explain his thoughts into the way data-mining mobile phone usage can be used to discover cultural trends.  He specifically mentions studying the impacts of moving from rural to urban environments, identifying types of students at MIT, and investigating the social hierarchy or friend structure of individuals.

He does mention that such data is often collected without the consent of consumers, but that with proper effort on the part of the researcher, individual privacy can be maintained, allowing researchers to cull through data exposing cultural trends.

Written by drewcogbill

July 24th, 2008 at 11:11 pm

“A message oriented phone system for low cost connectivity”

without comments

I stumbled on a paper by R.J. Honicky, et al., called “A message oriented phone system for low cost connectivity” when I was on Nathan Eagle’s publication page.  Nathan Eagle is the PI for EPROM.

This paper excited me because it’s about an idea for a voice message based system for people living in developing countries.  The system it proposes is much more concerned with hardware and infrastructure than my Pigeon idea, but it a great point for helping me to continue generating questions about communication in developing countires and to begin more academic research.

I had been thinking about Pigeon more in terms of international calling, but domestic use could be useful also.  As I’ve been talking to people about mobile phone use in Belize, there are still hoops people will jump through to save their credit.  Something that could help them save money and communicate more easily would have a good chance of being adopted.

The paper mentions how a voice message system would effectively put people on the grid who live in areas where there is no mobile coverage but travel often to areas with coverage.  In this case, asynchronous communication may be beneficial since when a person will be avaliable is unknown.  Honicky’s proposed system would allow people to record when they are unconnected and then to upload when they are in a connected area.

Written by drewcogbill

July 15th, 2008 at 11:39 pm