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Wireless Networking Education Hardware

MIT Mapping Students WiFi Access in 3D 127

Posted by Zonk from the those-wacky-nerds-(tm) dept.
GuitarNeophyte writes "Ever wished that you had a way to just look at a map and find your friends across campus? Or wanted to find an open study lounge without having to foot it on over? Well, with MIT's new WiFi Mapping project, you can. They've set up large plexiglass maps, projecting dots over a campus map, allowing you to know the concentration of WiFi users in various parts of the grounds. With over 2800 access points, locations of individual students (if they have opted to reveal their information) can be found with accuracy as close as the individual classroom (even in multi-story buildings). It's also had the affect of providing some interesting research on study patterns, '[R]esearchers also found that study labs that once bustled with students are now nearly empty as people, no longer tethered to a phone line or network cable, move to cafes and nearby lounges, where food and comfy chairs are more inviting.'"
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MIT Mapping Students WiFi Access in 3D More

MIT Mapping Students WiFi Access in 3D

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  • What do they call it? (Score:5, Funny)

    by sebgeek ( 919473 ) on Friday November 04, 2005 @05:25PM (#13953371) Homepage
    Do they call it "The Marauders Map"?

  • affect != effect (Score:1, Informative)

    by destiney ( 149922 )


    also had the affect

    You mean 'effect'?

  • Good Family (Score:5, Funny)

    by MikeMacK ( 788889 ) on Friday November 04, 2005 @05:30PM (#13953408)
    Rich Pell, a 21-year-old electrical engineering senior from Spartanburg, South Carolina

    Hmmm...I wonder if he got a grant to go to school?

  • Tuition (Score:3, Informative)

    by superpulpsicle ( 533373 ) on Friday November 04, 2005 @05:32PM (#13953429)
    So how much did tuition increase by with the new Wifi? Isn't it already $40,000 a year at MIT after room, board, books, food.

    • Except that this project is done by a particular lab with its own funding. Did you think that all research projects done at MIT are paid for with tuition?

    • Re:Tuition (Score:3, Interesting)

      by porcupine8 ( 816071 )
      Luckily, they're pretty generous with the financial aid. I have less in loans from my five years at MIT as from my two years in a Master's program afterwards - at a public school (though I wasn't in-state).

  • a cheap pc? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by josephdrivein ( 924831 ) on Friday November 04, 2005 @05:32PM (#13953431)
    At the end of the day, when university is empty, you can check on the map if someone forgot his computer. I guess you could get 5-10 pc a year.
    • Perhaps you meant "In the morning, when the university is empty...." Night is the only time you're likely to find large concentrations of students on the MIT campus :-)
    • I don't know what it's like at MIT, having never been there. At Cornell, most of the spaces are packed 24/7, at least, in the areas where engineers live.

      Perhaps you'd have better luck with in parts of campus where people major in easier topics. The point being, campus never empties out.
      • Nitsuj, it's Jester99 from back in #tpu. I'm a senior in CS at Cornell. We should grab a beer at the Chapter House sometime and catch up a bit. (You can figure out how to send me an email.)

        And yeah, I wish more people *would* leave Phillips 318... it's gettin' kind of a "funk" to it that comes with a lack of showering...

  • No MIT Kids in the Labs (Score:5, Funny)

    by eestar ( 874541 ) on Friday November 04, 2005 @05:35PM (#13953456)
    Labs are empty and Cafes are full at MIT. Yeah right, those kids don't want to socialize, that is why they got into MIT. They love the lab, in fact they never leave their labs, which is obvious once you smell them. A geek without a lab is like a race car driver without a car.
    • What are you, from the stone age? WIFI my man! They can hunch over their screens and be within arms length of decent coffee.

      No more will they be subject to the horrors of vending machine java while they pound out the code of the same name. Real coffee instead of something that looks, smells, and tastes like it was pooled under a car that was built in East Germany the same day I was born.

  • They've been doig this at UCSD for years... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Rockenreno ( 573442 ) <(rockenreno) (at) (gmail.com)> on Friday November 04, 2005 @05:35PM (#13953458)
    Of course this makes headlines when MIT does it, but everyone ignores that UC San Diego began something similar years ago. They gave out PDAs (crappy ones, mind you... HP Jornada) to a few thousand students so that they could see each other as long as they were within range of the access points. I have to admit, I never used it because the PDA they gave me lasted about 30 minutes on a full battery charge, but it looked pretty interesting when I was a freshman there. I'm sure they're not the only other campus to have tried this, either. http://activecampus.ucsd.edu/ [ucsd.edu]
    • Mmm. I've been getting a little irritated lately seeing how Slashdot and the general tech media are becoming heavily MIT-centric.

      Cool stuff is going on at other institutions too! MIT Builds (in my opinion) one of the ugliest buildings ever conceived, and gets a full 2-page color spread in Wired. Is it just that all of our tech writers went to MIT, or that there's a little payola going on?

      At least it's better than the conventional media which tries to hide the fact that most reporters' only real qualifica
      • MIT is an interesting institution. People think it does everything from low level compiler optimizations, to multi-terrabyte optical network multiplexing, and accelerated particle small galaxy creation. And some of that is certainly true. But everyone I know at MIT is working on things like displays that track your eyes and project the correct image onto your cornea to create 3D. Or social networking software that has pervasive independent intelligence to optimize a person's life. Or carbonated ice cre
        • Ok, I'll agree with you there, even though I'd like to pertend that Harvard and the rest of the Ivy League didn't exist (I believe that their legacy admission policies and artificially high prestige are a bane to american society, although that's an argument for another day).

          I guess what I'm driving at is that MIT seems to have borrowed Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field (RDF)

  • Hum (Score:5, Funny)

    by Arthur B. ( 806360 ) on Friday November 04, 2005 @05:36PM (#13953461)
    Sounds like a very nice system for stalking girls... Oh wait, MIT

  • Here [mit.edu] is the link to the MIT site

  • RF-based location search (Score:3, Interesting)

    by leighklotz ( 192300 ) on Friday November 04, 2005 @05:40PM (#13953494) Homepage
    Here's another [aprsworld.net] RF-based location search. The software is all OSS.

  • treasured map (Score:5, Funny)

    by moviepig.com ( 745183 ) on Friday November 04, 2005 @05:41PM (#13953514)
    a campus map, allowing you to know the...locations of individual students (IF they have opted to reveal their information)...

    ...or IF you're a Slytherin...

  • Good and bad for privacy/personal security! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by garcia ( 6573 ) on Friday November 04, 2005 @05:42PM (#13953521)
    "With these maps, you can see down to the room on campus how many people are logged on," said Carlo Ratti, director of the school's SENSEable City Laboratory, which created the maps. "You can even watch someone go from room to room if they have a handheld device that's connected."

    Very interesting from both sides of the privacy/security standpoint. You could theoretically track someone's daily habits or watch their track (and others nearby) if there was some sort of emergency. It would then be fairly easy to possibly narrow down who was in the area at the time which would lead to effective questioning, etc.

    Obviously it would be unlikely that a would-be attacker would have his device turned on at the time but even an MIT student might make a mistake ;)

  • Slightly misleading title, FUD style (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Douglas Simmons ( 628988 ) on Friday November 04, 2005 @05:43PM (#13953526) Homepage
    Mapping students? For this crowd especially, that is most certainly a Bad Thing(TM) when you glance at the title. What the title ought to have read with something more neutral, like Mapping Wi-Fi Concentration. When you decline students as the accusative, it sounds like something is directly doing something to the students. This is alarmistbate.

  • iSpots (Score:5, Informative)

    by HavokDevNull ( 99801 ) <eric@linux s y s t e m s . net> on Friday November 04, 2005 @05:46PM (#13953553) Homepage Journal
    Here is the iSpots (MIT's WiFi mapping and tracking) home page @ MIT with great pictures and more information

    http://ispots.mit.edu/ [mit.edu]

    Enjoy!

  • I miss the lab. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by unsigned integer ( 721338 ) on Friday November 04, 2005 @05:50PM (#13953584)
    I'm serious. Nothing around you but other computers and students. Chugging the code on an all night project, with nothing but a 2 liter of Mt. Dew to fuel your sleep-deprived, caffeine induced coding hallucinations.

    Going to the lab was an explicit statement of "I'm getting shit done" - cutting yourself off from an many distractions as you possibly could (though email/web pervade) and working until you drop / it's done.

    I look fondly back at the labs these days - wish I was younger - and remember the all nighters and watching the sun rise. (From the top of the CII).

  • privacy implications (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    With or without explicit consent you can always track any person's movements but their wireless card's MAC address. This is has serious implications and is a violation of personal privacy and its reasonable expectation. Something should be done about that from a legal as well as from a technical perspective e.g. anonymizing access.

    On a sidenote, MIT is one of the largest polluter of the Cambridge airspace with hundreds of not exactly open access points that interfere with open ones nearby. They should at le

  • Shocking MIT study (Score:5, Funny)

    by Mirkon ( 618432 ) <mirkon@gma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Friday November 04, 2005 @05:56PM (#13953634) Homepage
    Researchers find that college students enjoy eating and sitting down.

    Tests are currently being conducted on the effect of both of these situations in tandem.

    The researchers suspect that children and adults will behave similarly, but have not yet conducted conclusive testing on the matter.
  • Here is a link to the actual project [mit.edu] It's interesting. I messed around with it a little today. I don't know if or what people outside MIT can see on it though.

  • Study patterns (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Red Flayer ( 890720 ) on Friday November 04, 2005 @06:04PM (#13953700) Journal
    "It's also had the affect of providing some interesting research on study patterns"

    Well, that is no surprise really. Reminds me of the College that didn't pave any walkways until after the first semester the campus was open... then just paved where people had worn paths. Should provide good, statistically reliable, insight into where resources for social/academic lounges should be located.

    OTOH, does MIT have a graduate program in sociology? I'm thinking of a great study on nerd relationships and mating behavior...

  • This is novel how? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ShakaUVM ( 157947 ) on Friday November 04, 2005 @06:13PM (#13953785) Homepage Journal
    This is novel how?

    At UCSD we've had this for ages.

    On a related note, Dr. Bennet Yee a prof at UCSD now working at Google, did a pretty cool hack when I was in his class. His laptop was GPS enabled, so whenever he'd turn it on, it'd grab GPS coordinates, then after reverse engineering mapquest's query string (this was before Google Maps, of course) he'd grab a map of the area around where he was, then would upload it to the class web page. It was called the Bennet Tracker, and was very useful for telling if your professor was hanging out at the coffee cart by Mandeville, or in Chicago, or whatever.

    I also wrote a tool (when I was TAing a lower division class) that would figure out the physical location of the students logged in to the server. Mainly I used it to stun and amaze my students, as they'd sit a row behind me in the lab, and I, without turning around, would say, "Hi Sean."

    But it was also useful when we had a rash of cheating incidents to be able to build a graph of which students had been sitting next to each other, even in other areas of campus. This group of two and this group of two were both sitting next to each other, and had diff-zero code for one entire .cc file? Yeah.
    • figure out the physical location of the students logged in to the server

      Call me stupid but, how did you do that? Something like, monitoring new logons, and matching the relative IP/its MAC with a map you had?
      • All done in a shell script. When running I'd have terminal up with all the students logged in, that would refresh every 10 seconds or so. When someone would log in our out, it'd beep and print the name near the bottom. Hostnames are all pretty regular at UCSD so you could always tell what lab they are in, and the computers in labs were all numbered sequentially. If you were a nerd you could make a map of each lab.

  • Breaking News!
    The latest research developments out of MIT have found that people actually spend more time where there are comfortable chairs and food!
  • In the photo, anyone else notice a mysterious yellow-looking cable going to the back of that "wirelessly connected" laptop? Am I seeing things, or am I right to be very amused?
  • When I was attending Indiana University at Bloomington about 12 years ago, someone had created a little unix app that did a similar thing. The program would display a simple ascii map of a specified computer room, pinpointing the location and name of each user currently logged on in that room.

    It was great fun for sneaking up and scaring the bejeez out of your friends. :-)
  • You can do something similar with Navizon [navizon.com]. You can use their Buddy Tracker [navizon.com] thingy to know where your buddies are using wifi. And you don't have to be an MIT student to use it :-)

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