Reality Mining: Digging the Impact of Friendship and Location on Crowd Behavior

Finding basic laws that govern human crowd behavior is a subject that deserves to study. Crowd behavior is a natural instinct for human, which directly impacts how we form opinions and make decisions. Moreover, it is common that people change their behavior in a group. In pervasive computing research, substantial work has been directed towards discovering human movement patterns based on wireless networks. This research has, however, mainly been focused on movements of individuals. Mobile phones offer on-body tracking and they are already deployed on a large scale, allowing the characterization of user behavior through the information related to individual movements. In this paper, we observe and analyze the impact of friendship and location attributes on crowd behavior, using location-based wireless mobility information. These preliminary studies will be a good cornerstone for a crowd behavior prediction.