Microsoft researchers have developed a
mobility prediction system that knows where you will be, even years
down the road. What does this mean for the future of business?
Would you like to know how crowded your drive to the beach will be in
three weeks? Or where your ex will be on a Friday night next month so
that you can avoid him?
Adam Sadilek, formerly of Microsoft, now a researcher at Google,
and John Krumm, a principal researcher at Microsoft, were inspired by
the question of predicting where people would be in the future and even
led off with the query, “Where are you going to be 285 days from now at
2PM?” in their their paper, Far Out: Predicting Long-Term Human Mobility.
“At first glance,” the researchers told us, “it sounds like a very difficult problem.”
Sadilek, Krumm, and others have done a lot of research on predicting
where a person might be in the immediate future--say, in an hour or two.
Logically enough, it's been found that a person’s previous location is a
good clue for their next location. But as these models are extended
into the future, they give poorer and poorer results. To guess with any
accuracy where someone would be in 20 or 200 days would be more of a
challenge. In order to do so, Sadilek and Krumm realized, they’d have to
develop new techniques.
