txteagle: Crowd-Sourcing on Mobile Phones in the Developing World

Nathan Eagle is a Research Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. His research involves applying machine learning and network analysis techniques to large human behavioral datasets generated by mobile phones. As a Fulbright Scholar in 2006, he launched MIT’s EPROM (Entrepreneurial Programming and Research on Mobiles) initiative while teaching in universities in Kenya and Ethiopia, developing a mobile phone programming curriculum that has been adopted by twelve Computer Science departments across Africa. He graduated from Stanford University with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering, an M.S. in Management Science and Engineering, and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering. His PhD from the MIT Media Laboratory on Reality Mining was declared one of the ‘10 technologies most likely to change the way we live’ by the MIT Technology Review magazine. Nokia recently named him one of the top mobile phone developers in the world. In 2008, he formed the company txteagle with the goal of enabling the 2 billion mobile phone subscribers living in the developing world to generate income using their phones. His research is regularly featured in the media including the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, and CNN.

• Web site