AT&T Labs Research

The Connected States of America maps communities

by: Alexandre Gerber, Deirdre W. Paul, James R. Rowland, and Christopher A. Rath, July 3, 2011

Borders—national, state, and city—exist for historical, geographic, cultural reasons. But how do they relate to communities people form through close interactions with others? As highlighted in a New York Times Op-Ed on Phone-call Cartography, researchers are using aggregated, anonymous cell phone data to map people’s self-formed communities and understand how they intersect with administrative borders.

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Students’ experiment wins spot on last shuttle

The last shuttle carried into space an experiment designed by New Jersey high-school students to study the effects of microgravity on osteoblast specialization and bone growth. It was one of 11 proposals selected (out of more than 500).

AT&T Research, through its support for Young Science Achievers Program and in conjunction with Student Spaceflight Experiments Program, provided half of the needed $20,000.

Latest speech technology enables Speak4it

Speak4it, a free multimodal iPhone & iPad app, lets you search by voice, touch, and gesture. Tell it what kind of business you want to find (“Thai restaurant” or “Steak houses near the Empire State Building”), and it shows you all nearby businesses. To designate a search location, point to it on a map or circle an area.

AT&T WATSON^TM and AT&T Natural Voices^® are two of the technologies behind both Speak4it and YPmobile^®.

AT&T Research at Joint Statistical Meetings 2011

AT&T Research will be heavily represented at this year's Joint Statistical Meetings conference, presenting eight papers and offering a tutorial in data stream mining.

Researchers are also active conference participants. David Poole is Program Chair for the Section on Statistical Computing, and Chris Volinsky is Program Chair-Elect. Simon Urbanek, a past-chair for the Section on Statistical Graphics, is an officer.

A Call for More Energy-Efficient Apps

When apps aren’t designed to work efficiently with the cellular network, batteries drain faster, performance suffers, and network resources are not well-utilized.

New technology from AT&T researchers and colleagues from the University of Michigan is revealing how simple design changes can result in apps that use less battery power and respond faster to user input. Read more

Music map a hit with 500,000 views at StumbleUpon

The relationships depicted in Yifan Hu's music map may puzzle some, but the data—acquired by crawling Last.fm—doesn’t lie. Hu applied a clustering/visualization algorithm (Graphviz’s gvmap) to the data to find clusters of music groups liked by the same listeners; the closer the groups, the more listeners in common.

Type in a music group, then zoom in to explore the neighbors.

Not for laughs: Tools of the adversarial reviewer

A big part of life for any researcher is communicating ideas in the form of peer-reviewed scientific papers. The process of peer review is itself a topic for study.

In contrast to soberly written articles on how to write reviews (articles that aren’t much fun to read), Graham Cormode takes a different tack in a much-downloaded paper, outing the unfair and nasty techniques of the adversarial reviewer.