Making our smartphones less stupid

A couple weeks ago I wrote about my hopes for iPhone 5. For it to include an "operating system" that likely will be fully impossible til at least iPhone 7, say.

We take our smartphones with us everywhere. We use them all the time. Inside, they contain more information, more specific data about us than possibly any person, even our closest loved ones, know about us. When connected to the cloud, the amount of information -- and knowledge -- grows exponentially. Yet, the smartphone remains stupid. Limited.  A revolution is needed.

I believe that revolution is the recommendation engine. To wit: Smartly, wisely proactive, rapidly reactive, based on real-time awareness of where we are, who we are with, what we are doing, and combined with the massive amounts of data contained within the smartphone and linked to us and the device, via the cloud, the recommendation engine, one that actually works and thinks, will alter, fundamentally, how we conduct our business, connect with our surroundings, interact with friends, integrate with information, databases, social media, search queries, and the near-infinite number and kind of computing resources and applications available. (deep breath)

That would be a revolution. That would tear up the very notions of an ecosystem. In fact, distill it down to its basic elements: functionality and access. The hardware, the local data, the cloud data, and the real-time *wisdom* from the recommendation engine, combined, would be its own (new) ecosystem. No notifications, as they are now meaningless. Search is likewise irrlevant, with a device that knows what you seek before asking. Similarly, the app itself, which provides functionality + access vanishes. These are barriers, limitations, the equivalent of digital buttons. And Jobs hates buttons.

As it turns out, MIT has a small project that may help bring this vision closer to reality. And provides us insight with what Apple is beginning to learn about us with all that location data they've been collecting and storing.

For almost two years, Alex Pentland at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has tracked 60 families living in campus quarters via sensors and software on their smartphones—recording their movements, relationships, moods, health, calling habits and spending. In this wealth of intimate detail, he is finding patterns of human behavior that could reveal how millions of people interact at home, work and play.

 As a tool for field research, the cellphone is unique. Unlike a conventional land-line telephone, a mobile phone usually is used by only one person, and it stays with that person everywhere, throughout the day. Phone companies routinely track a handset's location (in part to connect it to the nearest cellphone tower) along with the timing and duration of phone calls and the user's billing address.

Typically, the handset logs calling data, messaging activity, search requests and online activities. Many smartphones also come equipped with sensors to record movements, sense its proximity to other people with phones, detect light levels, and take pictures or video. It usually also has a compass, a gyroscope and an accelerometer to sense rotation and direction.

The MIT smartphone experiment is designed to delve as deeply as possible into daily life. For his work, Dr. Pentland gave volunteers free Android smartphones equipped with software that automatically logged their activities and their proximity to other people. The participants also filed reports on their health, weight, eating habits, opinions, purchases and other personal information, so the researchers could match the phone data to relationships and behavior.

Every six minutes, each student's phone scanned for any other phone within 10 feet, as a way to identify face-to-face meetings. Among other things, each phone also reported its location and compiled an anonymous log of calls and text messages every 20 minutes. All told, the researchers compiled 320,000 hours of data about the students' behavior and relationships, buttressed by detailed surveys.

"Just by watching where you spend time, I can say a lot about the music you like, the car you drive, your financial risk, your risk for diabetes. If you add financial data, you get an even greater insight," said Dr. Pentland. "We are trying to understand the molecules of behavior in this really complete way."