Word.ws English Dictionary

reality mining

reality mining noun: the collection and analysis of machine-sensed environmental data pertaining to human social behavior, with the goal of identifying predictable patterns of behavior.

Noun

reality mining (uncountable)

  1. The collection and analysis of machine-sensed environmental data pertaining to human social behavior, with the goal of identifying predictable patterns of behavior.
    • Most working professionals already carry microphones (cell phones), and many also carry PDAs with ample computational horsepower. This foundation of mobile communications and processing power will support an exciting new suite of business applications: reality mining.2004 March 31, Alex Pentland, ““Reality Mining” the Organization”, in MIT Technology Review
    • Practitioners of Reality Mining soon discover the multitudes of analytic techniques suitable for their data sets.2014, Nathan Eagle, Kate Greene, Reality Mining: Using Big Data to Engineer a Better World, MIT Press, →ISBN, page 5

Origin of reality mining

Coined by Alex Pentland and Nathan Eagle, after data mining, etc.

Questions about reality mining

What does reality mining mean?
Reality mining means the collection and analysis of machine-sensed environmental data pertaining to human social behavior, with the goal of identifying predictable patterns of behavior.
What part of speech is reality mining?
Reality mining is a noun.

Words near reality mining in the dictionary

  1. reality check
  2. reality checks
  3. reality distortion field
  4. reality distortion fields
  5. reality gap
  6. reality mining
  7. reality pornography
  8. reality principle
  9. reality shifter
  10. reality shifters
  11. reality shifting

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: reality mining (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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