At a time of huge distrust of government intervention and privacy violations around the world, MIT Professor and IDE Lead, Sandy Pentland is focused on what your smartphone can tell about you and your community. Used properly, such data can keep you healthy, employed, and free of government control, he recently told Michael Hainsworth in an extensive interview at MIT:
Pentland described recent MIT research in Saudi Arabia that used anonymized data about where everyone in Riyadh went and who they were in contact with to predict unemployment and give the government an early warning indicator about where social services needed to be deployed to contain and diminish joblessness. Watch the video and read more on the Futurithmic site here.
HT: MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy.
