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3 November 2008

Large Scale Real-Time Behavioral Feedback with Sensors

I previously blogged about how environmental sensors could transform how we think about architecture and how this data could be combined with wearable sensors. At the Media Lab's Awareness event, held last Thursday, myself and other Media Lab researchers explored this in more detail. At this event, over 150 sponsors, students, and faculty wore Sociometric Badges for the entire day so that we could show how interactions and behavior varied across different areas of the lab during different parts of the day, as well as give people insights into how different companies behaved: do people from Hitachi and Canon have similar behavior patterns? Do they see the same demos? We gave participants real time feedback on displays scattered around the lab. Here's a screenshot, but a video is coming:

This shows the activity in the different areas. Each circle represents a person, and circles grow as people stay in an area for longer. The solid portion of each circle indicates how much people are talking, and the color indicates how engaged that person is in talking (dark green implies not engaged, bright green is very engaged), which we extract in real time from the microphone on the badges. The circles also move around based on accelerometer activity, so the position information is only based on what basestation people were close to, giving us what room they were in.
Our badges interacted with Ubiquitous Sensor Portals created by the Responsive Environments group, which allowed people to browse video feeds of the building in real time. Eventually this system will enable interaction between the virtual world (i.e. Second Life) and the real world by allowing for voice communication through the portals to other portals or virtual partners in Second Life. Here's a picture of the portals:

At the end of the day we also gave participants feedback about their company's activity and companies that were similar to them. By using the badges to figure out who talked to whom, we grouped companies and people together that saw similar demos, met the same people, had similar behavioral patterns, etc. It was amazing that companies often had more in common with companies outside their industry than with those within it. We actually generated a network of interest similarity, which (not surprisingly) showed the Media Lab at the center with many other companies tapping in to a core of sponsors with many diverse interests, which were not always the companies with the most attendants. The personalized feedback was also very interesting, since we showed people who you may be interested in meeting based on the same features we used for companies. This appeared to work extremely well, since two other people in my research group appeared in my feedback even though I never interacted with them that day. While this information is not useful in and of itself, it did convince me of the system's effectiveness, which for users would help them trust other recommendations.

The point of all of this was not to show how this technology can impact a one-day event. After all, there's not much time for real-time reflection in one day. Instead we aimed to spark discussion about how continuous deployments of these systems could fundamentally change businesses and public spaces in general. Imagine continuous feedback on behavior, personally customized by you to help increase your productivity and effectiveness. Imagine spaces where the line between virtual and physical is blurred to the point where you can just as easily have a conversation with the person next to you as with the person next to you in the virtual representation of your building in Second Life. The Sensor Portals will continue to be active at the Media Lab, allowing us to continually tailor this system to be the most beneficial to users and further research.

We are also nearing deployment of our Sensible Organization tools in the laboratory of one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies as well as in the call center of a major financial firm. We hope to measure through these interventions whether or not we can raise productivity and enhance community within organizations, as well as answer deep theoretical questions on networks and behavior. In social network theory there is the frequent claim that central individuals tend to be more productive because they have access to more diverse information, but the causality issue has not been thoroughly studied. Maybe more productive people simply tend to be more central, so we should instead try to detect behavioral and psychological characteristics to create feedback systems. By creating recommendation systems that actually make individuals more central (see my paper describing this system), enabling us to give empirical support to theoretical arguments.

This technology will fundamentally change organizations and management as a whole, and this deployment is the first step in this direction. Over the next few months through longer term experiments we'll begin to learn exactly what this means, and how management practices can change to take advantage of this data while at the same time using it to empower employees to make the right decisions. Stay tuned.

Posted by Ben Waber at November 3, 2008 4:52 PM

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