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."
I started browsing reality around the age of 1, when I learned to WALK.
Vague name with 'mining' - check.
Gratuitous use of the word 'virtual' - check.
'Shopping' is involved somehow - check.
Time to go hustle up some VC like it was 1997!
People have been talking about integrating sensor networks like this for a long time. One issue that comes up often is what to do about privacy - especially with regard to image data. You can put a camera on every building in town - and you can be guaranteed that at least one person per day will object to having their picture taken and used for some open-source data fusion project.
This sig is a test. If this had been an actual sig, you would be reading something quite a bit wittier than this now.
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!
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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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.
Quite a few Slashdot readers think Roland Piquepaille (rpiquepa is exploiting this site as a way of upping his ad impressions. There's a strong argument that he wants to turn the Slashdot effect into ad money, and this is supported by the habit he has of linking not to the article, but to a verbatim copy posted on his ad-supported blog. Engadget (ptorrone) are pretty dubious too, but at least they bother to write their own content.
/. editors, and I don't necessarily think that their submissions should be rejected. Whether they are astroturf or not is up to the individual reader to decide, and some people seem to enjoy them. What I would like to see is the ability to let the individual block submissions from particular users somehow, either as a subscription feature (block by UID / foes list), or a Firefox extension (based on NukeAnything perhaps).
Having said that, I don't think Roland etc are bribing the
And I no, I don't have the time / skillset / influence to code the above myself. I'm just putting some ideas out for discussion.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling