AIRSAGE. ACCREDITED DATA VALIDATION
Published
aIRSAGE IN RESEARCH
How Wireless Carriers Monetize Your Movements
April 2013
...some startups are building businesses by aggregating this kind of data in useful ways, beyond what individual companies may offer. For example, AirSage, an Atlanta company founded in 2000, has spent much of the last decade negotiating what it says are exclusive rights to put its hardware inside the firewalls of two of the top three U.S. wireless carriers and collect, anonymize, encrypt and analyze cellular tower signaling data in real time.
Since AirSage solidified the second of these major partnerships about a year ago (it won't specify which specific carriers it works with), it has been processing 15 billion locations a day and can account for movement of about a third of the U.S. population in some places to within less than 100 meters, says marketing vice president Andrea Moe.
As users' mobile devices ping cellular towers in different locations, AirSage's algorithms look for patterns in that location data - mostly to help transportation planners and traffic reports, so far. For example, the software might infer that the owners of devices that spend time in a business part from nine to five are likely at work, so a highway engineer might be able to estimate how much traffic on the local freeway exit is due to commuters.
Published by: MIT Technology Review
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/513016/how-wireless-carriers-are-monetizing-your-movements/
Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think
March 2013
The ability to collect users' geo-loco data is becoming extremely valuable. On an individual level, it allows targeted advertising based on where the person is situated or is predicated to. Moreover, the information can be aggregated to reveal trends. For 
instance, amassing location data lets firms detect traffic jams without needing to see the cars: the number and speed of phones traveling on a highway reveal this information. The company AirSage crunches 15 billion geo-loco records daily from the travels of milions of cellphone subscribers to create real-time traffic reports in over 100 cities across America...
Research by: Mayer-Schonberger, Viktor, and Kenneth Cukier. "Datafication." Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think.
Understanding Road Usage Patterns in Urban Areas
December 2012
A global team of researchers have combined the most complete record of daily mobility, based on large-scale mobile phone data, with detailed Geographic Information System (GIS) data, uncovering previously hidden patterns in urban road usage. We find that the major usage of each road segment can be traced to its own - surprisingly few - driver sources. Based on this research, they propose a network of road usage by defining a bipartite network framework, demonstrating that in contrast to traditional approaches, which define road importance solely by topological measures, the role of a road segment depends on both: its betweeness and its degree in the road usage network. Moreover, their ability to pinpoint the few driver sources contributing to the major traffic flow allowed them to create a strategy that achieves a significant reduction of the travel time across the entire road system, compared to a benchmark approach.
Research by: Pu Wang, Central South University, P.R. China and Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Timothy Hunter, University of California, Berkeley; Alexandre M. Bayen, University of California, Berkeley; Katja Schechtner, Austrian Institute of Technology, Austria and Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Marta C. Gonzalez, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Understanding Individual Mobility Patterns from Urban Sensing Data: A Mobile Phone Trace Example
September 2012
In the National University of Singapore, Institute of Real-Estate Studies Working Paper Series, researchers used mobile-phone traces as a data source for urban-modeling as opposed to traditional methods data collection, like traffic surveys. AirSage mobile-phone data allowed for “lower collection cost, a larger sample size, higher update frequency, and a broader spatial and temporal coverage” (see page 3). Finding useful insight on intra-urban mobility patterns, which is crucial to their research, was accomplished through AirSage’s Wireless Signal Extraction Technology.
Research by: Francesco Calabrese, IBM Dublin Research Laboratory and SENSEable City Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Mi Diao, Department of Real Estate and Institute of Real Estate Studies, National University of Singapore; Giusy Di Lorenzo, IBM Research and Institute of Real Estate Studies, National University of Singapore; Joseph Ferreira, Jr. Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Carlo Ratti, Department of Urban Studies and Planning and SENSEable City Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Predicting Personal Mobility with Individual and Group Travel Histories
February 2012
IBM and participants from MIT investigate the use of mobile phones as a study platform for location data and group travel histories with the help of AirSage data to replace the use of dedicated GPS systems due to the “serious reliability and management issues” associated with their use (see page 3). They concluded that the use of GPS data was “not necessarily any more accurate than those produced by AirSage’s passive ‘Wireless Extraction’ system” which is why the use of smartphones is so important for their kind of research: “because such phones tend to be in near-constant contact with the network (to check for new email, to browse the web, download updates, etc.) they generate detailed traces that can be used to construct path histories with high fidelity across long periods of time.” (see page 19)
Research by: Giusy Di Lorenzo, IBM Research, Smarter Cities Technology Centre; Johathan Reades, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London; Francesco Calabrese, IBM Research, Smarter Cities Technology Centre and SENSEable City Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Carlo Ratti, SENSEable City Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
This research is also referenced in the September 2012 the article “Creating the Sustainable City: A Community Engagement Strategy That’s Working” by Cori Burbach.
Mobile Phones and Outdoor Advertising: Measurable Advertising
April - June 2011
“Mobile phone technologies can produce audience measurements that are more credible than current static measurements and can reasonably expect that credible audience measurements will make it possible for outdoor advertising to reach its full potential in the future.” This conclusion was come to by Pervasive Reasearch group when they set out to create a system for measuring the audiences of outdoor advertisments. Through AirSage they were able to use mobile phone location estimations as one of their primary research methods and reach a conclusion for their results.
Research by: Daniele Quercia, University of Cambridge; Giusy Di Lorenzo
and Francesco Calabrese, IBM Dublin Research Laboratory; Carlo Ratti, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MIT SENSEable City Lab-Estimating Origin Destination Flows Using Opportunistically Collected Mobile Phone Location Data from 1 million Users in the Boston Metropolitan Area
2011
In October 2011, MIT SENSEable City Labratory proved that “pervasive datasets, such as mobile phone traces provide rich information to support transportation planning and operation” (see page 9). They claimed that estimating a population’s travel demand in terms of origins and destinations of individual trips through mobile phone data would be a critical component of transportation management and emergency response. The lab’s analysis of 829 million mobile phone location data for 1 million devices was made possible through the AirSage Wireless Signal Extraction technology, which not only allowed them to ID the cell tower each mobile phone was connected to, but also gave them an estimation of its position within a cell.
Research by: Francesco Calabrese and Giusy di Lorenzo, IBM Dublin Research Laboratory; Liang Liu and Carlo Ratti, SENSEable City
Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Andrea Moe
VP Product Management and Marketing
Press Email: amoe@airsage.com
Press Phone: +1 678-399-6956
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