“Researchers at MIT may not be able to hear your cellphone call,but they have found a way to see it”,MIT’s news office reports.”They mapped a city in real time by tracking tens of thousands of people traveling about carrying cellphones.Using anonymous cellphone data provided by the leading cellphone operator in Austria,A1/Mobilkom, the researchers developed the Mobile Landscapes project,creating electronic maps of cellphone use in the metropolitan area of Graz,Austria,the country’s second-largest city.The researchers used three types of data,density of cellphone calls,origins and destinations of the calls,and position of users tracked at regular intervals,to create computer-generated images that can be overlayed with one another and with geographic and street maps of a city to show the peaks and valleys of the landscape as well as peaks in cellphone use”.

MIT researchers map city by cellphone