Nathan Eagle’s talk focuses on two unique aspects of his work. As a PhD student at MIT, Eagle created mathematical models of data coming from mobile devices and an algorithm that analyzed this data from his sample of 100 students and could predict what each would do next. Since then he has been working with much larger mobile data sets from up to 250 million people in Europe, Asia, and Africa to help telecom companies better understand their customers and also to create a model of contagion dissemination.

Eagle then turns his talk to the work he has been doing for the past two years in Kenya. The majority of the mobile phone user market lives in developing countries and is under-served, a condition which motivated MIT to start EPROM, Entrepreneurial Programming and Research on Mobiles, to make sure computer science students in Africa learn how to program mobile phones. Eagle describes two student projects he has been involved with in Africa – one in which mobile text messaging has been used for hospital blood supply management across the country and a second in which an SMS bulletin board was created allowing low-end mobile handsets to access web content similar to craigslist.