MIT Mapping Students WiFi Access in 3D

GuitarNeophyte writes "Ever wished that you had a way to just look at a map and find your friends across campus? Or wanted to find an open study lounge without having to foot it on over? Well, with MIT's new WiFi Mapping project, you can. They've set up large plexiglass maps, projecting dots over a campus map, allowing you to know the concentration of WiFi users in various parts of the grounds. With over 2800 access points, locations of individual students (if they have opted to reveal their information) can be found with accuracy as close as the individual classroom (even in multi-story buildings). It's also had the affect of providing some interesting research on study patterns, '[R]esearchers also found that study labs that once bustled with students are now nearly empty as people, no longer tethered to a phone line or network cable, move to cafes and nearby lounges, where food and comfy chairs are more inviting.'"

Comments

a cheap pc?

[josephdrivein]

At the end of the day, when university is empty, you can check on the map if someone forgot his computer. I guess you could get 5-10 pc a year.

They've been doig this at UCSD for years...

[Rockenreno]

Of course this makes headlines when MIT does it, but everyone ignores that UC San Diego began something similar years ago. They gave out PDAs (crappy ones, mind you... HP Jornada) to a few thousand students so that they could see each other as long as they were within range of the access points. I have to admit, I never used it because the PDA they gave me lasted about 30 minutes on a full battery charge, but it looked pretty interesting when I was a freshman there. I'm sure they're not the only other campus to have tried this, either. http://activecampus.ucsd.edu/

RF-based location search

[leighklotz]

Here's another RF-based location search. The software is all OSS.

Re:Tuition

[porcupine8]

Luckily, they're pretty generous with the financial aid. I have less in loans from my five years at MIT as from my two years in a Master's program afterwards - at a public school (though I wasn't in-state).

Good and bad for privacy/personal security!

[garcia]

"With these maps, you can see down to the room on campus how many people are logged on," said Carlo Ratti, director of the school's SENSEable City Laboratory, which created the maps. "You can even watch someone go from room to room if they have a handheld device that's connected."

Very interesting from both sides of the privacy/security standpoint. You could theoretically track someone's daily habits or watch their track (and others nearby) if there was some sort of emergency. It would then be fairly easy to possibly narrow down who was in the area at the time which would lead to effective questioning, etc.

Obviously it would be unlikely that a would-be attacker would have his device turned on at the time but even an MIT student might make a mistake ;)

Slightly misleading title, FUD style

[Douglas Simmons]

Mapping students? For this crowd especially, that is most certainly a Bad Thing(TM) when you glance at the title. What the title ought to have read with something more neutral, like Mapping Wi-Fi Concentration. When you decline students as the accusative, it sounds like something is directly doing something to the students. This is alarmistbate.

Study patterns

[Red Flayer]

"It's also had the affect of providing some interesting research on study patterns"

Well, that is no surprise really. Reminds me of the College that didn't pave any walkways until after the first semester the campus was open... then just paved where people had worn paths. Should provide good, statistically reliable, insight into where resources for social/academic lounges should be located.

OTOH, does MIT have a graduate program in sociology? I'm thinking of a great study on nerd relationships and mating behavior...

This is novel how?

[ShakaUVM]

This is novel how?

At UCSD we've had this for ages.

On a related note, Dr. Bennet Yee a prof at UCSD now working at Google, did a pretty cool hack when I was in his class. His laptop was GPS enabled, so whenever he'd turn it on, it'd grab GPS coordinates, then after reverse engineering mapquest's query string (this was before Google Maps, of course) he'd grab a map of the area around where he was, then would upload it to the class web page. It was called the Bennet Tracker, and was very useful for telling if your professor was hanging out at the coffee cart by Mandeville, or in Chicago, or whatever.

I also wrote a tool (when I was TAing a lower division class) that would figure out the physical location of the students logged in to the server. Mainly I used it to stun and amaze my students, as they'd sit a row behind me in the lab, and I, without turning around, would say, "Hi Sean."

But it was also useful when we had a rash of cheating incidents to be able to build a graph of which students had been sitting next to each other, even in other areas of campus. This group of two and this group of two were both sitting next to each other, and had diff-zero code for one entire .cc file? Yeah.