Purdue researchers use AI to predict students' locations and friends from Wi-Fi data

Location-based check-ins reveal a lot about a person -- and college students in particular, as it turns out. Researchers at Purdue University published a paper ("Exploring Student Check-In Behavior for Improved Point-of-Interest Prediction") on the preprint server Arxiv.org Predicting locations and friendships from location data with AI might sound a bit creepy, true. But on the plus side, it's not as dystopian as AI that can predict personality traits from eye movements. "In point-of-interest (POI) tasks, the goal is to use user behavioral data to model users' activities at different locations and times, and then make predictions (or recommendations for relevant venues based on their current context," the researchers wrote.