Boffins from MIT have taken anonymous cell phone usage information to create some interesting profiles of cities, reports Cellular News.

Today the experience, infrastructure and morphology of the city are more closely related than ever before. It also provides designers, artists, and theoreticians a new means for engaging and understanding the city. Therefore, forget old ways to describe cities!

Digital Derive, as their project is called, harnesses the potential of mobile phones as an affordable, ready-made and ubiquitous medium that allows the city to be sensed and displayed in real-time as a complex, pulsating entity. Because it is possible to simultaneously ‘ping’ the cell phones of thousands of users - thereby establishing their precise location in space at a given moment in time - these devices can be used as a highly dynamic tracking tool that describes how the city is used and transformed by its citizens.