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

What do they call it?

[sebgeek]

Do they call it "The Marauders Map"?

Re:I have TWO WORDS for you all

[rovingeyes]

Privacy Nightmare

FTA: "(if they have opted to reveal their information)"

Re:I have TWO WORDS for you all

[Gr33nNight]

Did you even read the article? Students have to opt in. Not opt out. Which means they arnt automatically displayed, they have to use their hands and do some typing to be shown on this grid. I dont see any privacy problems when its up to an individual if they want to be shown.

Re:I have TWO WORDS for you all

[slavemowgli]

Here's another two: OPT-IN. Nobody's forced to participate here, and in fact, you're not even in by default, so there really should be no privacy problems.

Good Family

[MikeMacK]

Rich Pell, a 21-year-old electrical engineering senior from Spartanburg, South Carolina

Hmmm...I wonder if he got a grant to go to school?

Re:I have TWO WORDS for you all

[exi1ed0ne]

Just because the information is hidden, what about unscrupulous system admins? Law enforcement? Etc. It could even be discoverable for lawsuits.

History has shown that if the capability exists, it will be used.

Tuition

[superpulpsicle]

So how much did tuition increase by with the new Wifi? Isn't it already $40,000 a year at MIT after room, board, books, food.

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).

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.

Re:I have TWO WORDS for you all

[mattOzan]

I have two words as well:

affect effect

Which one doesn't belong?

Re:I have TWO WORDS for you all

[Anonymous Coward]

As one of the student developers I can say that that is one of our primary concerns, and part of Phase 2 of iSPOTS is a way to keep the logged data safe from unscrupulous admins, and law enforcement.

No MIT Kids in the Labs

[eestar]

Labs are empty and Cafes are full at MIT. Yeah right, those kids don't want to socialize, that is why they got into MIT. They love the lab, in fact they never leave their labs, which is obvious once you smell them. A geek without a lab is like a race car driver without a car.

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/

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

[cgenman]

MIT is an interesting institution. People think it does everything from low level compiler optimizations, to multi-terrabyte optical network multiplexing, and accelerated particle small galaxy creation. And some of that is certainly true. But everyone I know at MIT is working on things like displays that track your eyes and project the correct image onto your cornea to create 3D. Or social networking software that has pervasive independent intelligence to optimize a person's life. Or carbonated ice cream.

Ultimately, MIT leaves normal computer science programs to do their "we make code faster" thing, and creating amazingly technical feats of oddly comprehensible geekery. Some friends are trying to create the worlds highest-bandwidth network by catapulting a ball full of terrabyte network drives over the Charles River from BU to MIT. Others have used their time in the MIT media lab to synthesize and create music generation programs. There is even a full lego lab.

MIT is just perfect if you need a story right away. Just look at some of what they do. Sure, some of it is hardcore geekery, but basically all of it is accessable. It is a bottomless fountain of weird, original ideas that make people think about things in different ways. UCSD has a nice computer program, but the volume of MIT stories is proportional to the volume of weird, interesting stuff the school generates.

UCI, my alma matter, has a good Comp Sci program too. But in my 5 (Ok, ok. 5 and 1/2) years there, I never once saw a wearable computing fashion show, let alone one that contained self-inflating clothing, mood rings that exchanged genetic material with other people's mood rings, jackets that were happy when touched, etc. And MIT has enough material to do odd, amazing stuff like this every week.

And yes, they're buried in work the whole time. Don't expect to see your MIT friends very often. But what they do is more often than not quite fun and easy to write stories about.

Oh, and it is convieniently next to Harvard. And the W3C is there. And it is next to Harvard. And Noam Chomsky, Tim Berners-Lee, Edward Lorenz, Marvin Minsky, and Richard Stallman are there, amongst other great interview sources. Did I mention Harvard?

Hum

[Arthur B.]

Sounds like a very nice system for stalking girls... Oh wait, MIT

Re:I have TWO WORDS for you all

[fiannaFailMan]

Did you even read the article?

Don't be riddiculous. This is Slashdot. Reading articles before commenting on them has no place here!

RF-based location search

[leighklotz]

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

treasured map

[moviepig.com]

a campus map, allowing you to know the...locations of individual students (IF they have opted to reveal their information)...

...or IF you're a Slytherin...

Re:I have TWO WORDS for you all

[Braino420]

teh tin foil hats will still work. however, teh goggles still do nothing.

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.

iSpots

[HavokDevNull]

Here is the iSpots (MIT's WiFi mapping and tracking) home page @ MIT with great pictures and more information

http://ispots.mit.edu/

Enjoy!

I miss the lab.

[unsigned integer]

I'm serious. Nothing around you but other computers and students. Chugging the code on an all night project, with nothing but a 2 liter of Mt. Dew to fuel your sleep-deprived, caffeine induced coding hallucinations.

Going to the lab was an explicit statement of "I'm getting shit done" - cutting yourself off from an many distractions as you possibly could (though email/web pervade) and working until you drop / it's done.

I look fondly back at the labs these days - wish I was younger - and remember the all nighters and watching the sun rise. (From the top of the CII).

Shocking MIT study

[Mirkon]

Researchers find that college students enjoy eating and sitting down.

Tests are currently being conducted on the effect of both of these situations in tandem.

The researchers suspect that children and adults will behave similarly, but have not yet conducted conclusive testing on the matter.

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.

A Simpler Version at IU Bloomington

[Oyume]

When I was attending Indiana University at Bloomington about 12 years ago, someone had created a little unix app that did a similar thing. The program would display a simple ascii map of a specified computer room, pinpointing the location and name of each user currently logged on in that room.

It was great fun for sneaking up and scaring the bejeez out of your friends. :-)

Re:I have Three words for you all.

[LWATCDR]

Don't log in. Really if you don't want to be found don't long onto the network. This isn't all that new or scary. Anytime you are logged on to a network somebody could tell where you are. What is really funny is since this can only track you in public places it isn't like you really have privacy to loose. Think about it even in your dorm your room really isn't private. What is next for the privacy nuts. Will they want everyone to have blindfolds so that none one can see you and report that you went to Circle K for a Mountain Dew and a snickers? There is no privacy protection in public space! It sort of violates the idea of public.