The Possibilities of Prediction

Mobile phones are increasingly equipped with sensors, such as accelerometers, GPS receivers, proximity sensors and cameras, which can be used to sense and interpret people behaviour in realtime.Novel user-centered sensing applications can be built by exploiting the availability of these technologies. Moreover, data extracted from the sensors can also be used to model and predict people behaviour and movement patterns, providing a very rich set of multi-dimensional data, which can be extremely useful, for instance, for marketing applications, real-time support for policy-makers and health interventions. In this talk I will discuss the scenarios that are opened by the emergence of this new paradigm of mobile anticipatory computing, presenting the challenges and the opportunities in this new field.