Slashdot Mirror
Browsing Reality With Sensor Networks
Roland Piquepaille writes "Welcome to the world of 'Reality Mining'! The billions of networked sensors that exist today are generating humongous streams of data. What about 'data mining' this big flow of data and discover our environment in a way that never existed before? Suddenly, sensors would look like pixels and we would start to browse reality as easily as we browse web pages today. Fascinating concept! Some fellows at Accenture Technology Labs are thinking about this and they already have designed some demos of reality mining software. Their demos include web agents, data modeling, GIS systems and much more. They also show how you could detect fires or how you would do virtual shopping. Please read their long article or this shorter summary for a couple of examples."
The US gov't wants to do this kind of thing, not with sensors but with data from credit cards, libraries, schools, airlines, etc. I haven't been too worried about this so far, considering that we don't have the technology to pull useful data out of all that noise, but if we can do it with sensor networks, who knows. How long until all of those cameras at intersections are hooked up into one all-seeing electronic mind that will always know where you're going and what you do when you get there?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
What they probably fail to mention is that this would work only for those places that they have "mined" beforehand.
So, if you are going to a new place, do not expect to have this information - if it's a well known or big place that people frequent and the like, you would have information. Else nothing.
Good idea, but if it's a well known place you would not really need this thing, anyway.
1: Make Roland Piquepaille a foe
2: Block my foe's submissions from my view of the front page
Failing that, howsabout you just ignore his submissions and move on to the next story?
/me forgot to check the submitter on this one. 'Doh!
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Free gmail invites
This is getting really annoying. Either put the bozo in his own section or stop posting his stupid ads. Or at least edit them to reference the original story, not the Plogged version. This is like being subscribed to PR Newswire.
From the article:
As cameras become a standard cell phone feature, we're becoming the most connected and instrumented people in history.
How are we merely becoming the most connected people? I don't remember seeing Caesar cruising through Rome, telling all his "boys" to "holla back at a brotha on my 2-Way, cause I'm a roll out to Cairo for a weekend dip in the Nile". Perhaps that is information that my public school budgets couldn't afford to dig up.
The problem is of course that people are against this. I, for one, do not have a problem as long as it's easily accessible public information. Think back to 20 years ago. What would you say if your next-door neighbor had our present time internet, with access to public records, opinions, sports cores, etc. etc. etc. We take it for granted now because everyone can do it.
I think this is probably what will cause the singularity.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
on how to pick the pockets of their clients. I have just rolled off a(nother) major project that they screwed up. The offshored it to their own delivery centre in Manila and I guess the project plan was a result of mining the imagination and the offshore delivery centre was full of virtual resources.
See my journal, I write things there