Dr. Nathan N. Eagle

The New York Times article Mobile Web: So Close Yet So Far said

“The user experience has been a disaster,” says Tony Davis, managing partner of Brightspark, a Toronto venture capital firm that has invested in two mobile Web companies.
 
The plot has plenty of time to twist yet again. Nathan Eagle an M.I.T. researcher, is working on mobile phone programming in Kenya, where he’s teaching computer science students how to build mobile Web applications that don’t use a browser. Instead, they rely on voice commands and speech-to-text translation to surf the Web.
 
“People talk about the mobile Web, and it’s just assumed that it’ll be a replica of the desktop experience,” Mr. Eagle said. “But they’re fundamentally different devices.” He says he thinks that the basic Web experience for most of the world’s three billion cellphones will never involve trying to thumb-type Web addresses or squint at e-mail messages. Instead, he says, it will be voice-driven. “People want to use their phone as a phone,” he says.

Nathan N. Eagle, Ph.D. is Research Scientist at MIT and cofounder and PI for their Large-Scale Network Analysis Project. He is also an Adjunct Professor at the GSTIT in Ethiopia and a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Nairobi.
 
Machine learning, mobile computing and complex network analysis are among his primary academic interests. His doctoral research at the MIT Media Lab used 100 mobile phones as behavioral sensors, programmed to continually log communication (call logs), movement and location (cellular tower IDs), and other people within 5–10 meters (regular Bluetooth scans). The resultant 400,000 hours of behavioral data provided insight into individuals’ routines, relationships, and the underlying dynamics governing aggregate behavior. He has named this space Reality Mining.
 
As a Research Scientist at MIT and cofounder and PI for their Large-Scale Network Analysis Project, he is currently analyzing behavioral datasets consisting of call logs and customer databases that effectively represent the topology and dynamics, respectively, of an entire country’s social network. Coupling call log data involving hundreds of millions of unique phone numbers and hundreds of billions of phone calls with information about purchasing behavior, he is developing algorithms to quantify the diffusion of product adoption and churn across this network.
 
As an Adjunct Professor at the GSTIT in Ethiopia and a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Nairobi, he has also been spending a large portion of his time in Africa developing EPROM (Entrepreneurial Programming and Research on Mobiles) as part of the Program for Developmental Entrepreneurship at the MIT Design Laboratory. The project’s aim is to design a globally applicable mobile phone programming curriculum while fostering mobile phone-related research and entrepreneurship.
 
Nathan authored Using Mobile Phones to Model Complex Social Systems and Can Serendipity Be Planned?, and coauthored Eigenbehaviors: Identifying Structure in Routine, Persistence and periodicity in a dynamic proximity network, Reality Mining: Sensing Complex Social Systems, Social Serendipity: Mobilizing Social Software, Organizational rhythms – the search for the patterns of the aggregate, Genetically Modified Network Topologies, and The Himalayan Water Mill Battery Charger. Read the full list of his publications!
 
Nathan earned his B.S. with an emphasis on Sensors and Mechatronics from the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University, School of Engineering in 1999. He earned his first M.S. with an emphasis on Systems Dynamics and High-Tech Entrepeneurship from the Department of Management Science and Engineering, Stanford University in 2001. He earned another M.S. with an emphasis on Computer Vision and Wireless Communications from the Department of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University in 2003. And he earned his Ph.D. with the dissertation Machine Perception and Learning of Complex Social Systems from MIT in 2005.
 
Read Nathan Eagle: Kenya and the future of mobile phones. Listen to his IT Conversations interview How My Phone Can Predict What I’ll Be Doing. Watch his presentation Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control at the LIFT07 conference in Geneva, Switzerland. Watch him on the LIFT Conference Panel: Facing the digital divide – Bringing it home.