Sociometric Badges

MIT Media Laboratory

Daniel Olguin Olguin, Benjamin Waber, Taemie Kim, Prof. Alex (Sandy) Pentland

A sociometric badge (commonly known as "sociometer") is a device whose main purpose is to automatically capture individual and collective patterns of behavior. We have built several hundred sociometric badges and used them in real organizations to automatically measure individual and collective patterns of behavior, predict human behavior from unconscious social signals, identify social affinity among individuals working in the same team, and enhance social interactions by providing feedback to the users of our system.

Press:

"Wearable sensors watch workers" MIT Technology Review (05/13/2009)

"Reading the body language of leadership" Business Week (03/12/2009)

"The truth is, spotting a lie isn't as easy as it looks" The Washington Post (02/15/2009)

"Workplace socializing is productive" Financial Post (12/24/2008)

"You may soon know if you are hogging the discussion" The New York Times (10/26/2008)

"Tuning in to unconscious communication" MIT News (10/21/2008)

"The power of nonverbal communication" The Wall Street Journal (10/20/2008)

"Every move you make" The Economist (08/20/2008)

"Clive Thompson on real-world social networks vs. Facebook friends" Wired Magazine (07/21/2008)

"Get a social life" Nature News (06/30/2008)

"What your cell-phone knows about you" Forbes (05/23/2008)

"TR10: A technology that will change the world" MIT Technology Review (03-04/2008)

"Confidence game" Boston Globe ( 08/17/2008)

"Q&A with Alex Pentland" Boston Globe (03/02/2008)

"Smart badges track human behavior" MIT Technology Review (01/30/2008)

"You might wear computing's next wave" USA Today (10/15/2007)

Press in other languages:

"Media Lab inventa o sociometro" Expresso (11/15/2008)

"L’important n’est pas ce qu’on dit, mais la façon dont on le dit" Techno-Science.net (11/18/2008)

"No se puede mentir en una entrevista" El Pais (11/08/2008)

"Crean un dispositivo capaz de medir el lenguaje no verbal" Tendencias 21 (10/23/2008)

"Des badges sociométriques pour mesurer l'interaction sociale" Techno-Science.net (02/05/2008)

"Um big brother? Parece, mas não é" Negocios (10/15/2007)

Scientific Publications:

Daniel Olguin Olguin, Benjamin N. Waber, Taemie Kim, Akshay Mohan, Koji Ara, and Alex (Sandy) Pentland. Sensible Organizations: Technology and Methodology for Automatically Measuring Organizational Behavior. To appear in IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics-Part B: Cybernetics, Vol. 39. No. 1, February 2009.

Alex Pentland et al. Computational Social Science. Science, Vol. 323, February, 2009.

Benjamin N. Waber, Daniel Olguin Olguin, Taemie Kim, and Alex (Sandy) Pentland. Understanding Organizational Behavior with Wearable Sensing Technology. Academy of Management Annual Meeting. Anaheim, CA. August, 2008.

Koji Ara, Naoto Kanehira, Daniel Olguín Olguín, Benjamin Waber, Taemie Kim, Akshay Mohan, Peter Gloor, Robert Laubacher, Daniel Oster, Alex (Sandy) Pentland, and Kazuo Yano. Sensible Organizations: Changing our Business and Work Styles through Sensor Data. Journal of Information Processing. The Information Processing Society of Japan. Vol. 16. April, 2008.

Benjamin N. Waber, Daniel Olguín Olguín, Taemie Kim, Akshay Mohan, Koji Ara, and Alex (Sandy) Pentland. Organizational Engineering using Sociometric Badges. NetSci 2007: International Workshop and Conference on Network Science (Contributed Talk). Queens, NYC. December, 2007.

Daniel Olguín Olguín, and Alex (Sandy) Pentland. Sociometric Badges: State of the Art and Future Applications. IEEE 11th International Symposium on Wearable Computing (Doctoral Colloquium Proceedings). Boston, MA. October, 2007.

Taemie Kim, Agnes Chang, and Alex (Sandy) Pentland. Enhancing Organizational Communication using Sociometric Badges. IEEE 11th International Symposium on Wearable Computing (Doctoral Colloquium Proceedings). Boston MA. October, 2007.

Benjamin N. Waber, and Alex (Sandy) Pentland. Augmented Social Reality. IEEE 11th International Symposium on Wearable Computing (Doctoral Colloquium Proceedings). Boston, MA. October, 2007.