D4D Challenge

Do you want to study a huge mobile phone data set? Well, if you write a 250-word abstract quickly and you get chosen as one of the lucky winners (based on your proposal), then here's your chance.

This is a very cool idea, and I like the idea of this kind of challenge very much. If one or more of my group members or collaborators wants to do this, then I will help him/her/them, but when there are too many cooks stirring the pot (as there are with mobile phone data), I usually steer myself towards other research directions. I do have a paper that uses data from the NetFlix Prize competition, but my collaborators and I studied used the data to study human dynamics and generative/rewiring mechanisms for networks for their own sake rather than practical things.

(Tip of the cap to Lada Adamic.)