Now Available: Innovators Under 35 2013 See The 2013 List »
Tanzeem Choudhury, 33
Inferring social networks automatically
Dartmouth College
Social-networking sites such as Facebook require users to find and confirm connections with other people. But what if your cell phone could automatically identify the people you know, and even sort them into categories?
If that capability arrives, it will be thanks to reality mining, a field that Tanzeem Choudhury pioneered as a PhD student at the MIT Media Lab. Working at Intel after graduation, she created a pager-size sensor pack--loaded with software plus microphones, accelerometers, and other data-gathering devices--to collect and analyze data about human interactions and activity. For instance, by processing verbal utterances, she can identify the most influential people in a social network.
Now an assistant professor of computer science at Dartmouth, Choudhury is conducting experiments with the sensor-laden iPhone. Within a few years, she says, simple versions of her software could be available for cell phones. --Kate Greene
2008 TR35 Winners
Blaise Agüera y Arcas
Building immersive 3-D environments
Dries Buytaert
Simple, flexible Web publishing
Jenova Chen
Gaming with the flow
Tanzeem Choudhury
Inferring social networks automatically
Jack Dorsey
Personal updates made simple
Stefanus Du Toit
Programming for parallel processors
Seth Hallem
Deconstructing software to find bugs
Xian-Sheng Hua
Enhancing video search
Sundar Iyer
Making memory at Internet speed
Farinaz Koushanfar
Locking microchips to prevent piracy
Johnny Lee
Streamlining human-computer interactions
Meredith Ringel Morris
Searching websites jointly
Andrew Ng
Building household robots
Adam Smith
Making sense of e-mail madness
JB Straubel
Engineering electric sports cars
Eric Wilhelm
Putting DIY projects online
Robert Wood
Building robotic flies