Techdirt:MIT Maps WiFi Users; Discovers Students Sleep In Dorms, Go To Class By Day

I work as a QA and software engineer in the RFID locationing field. I work on apps that display floor plan maps of assets and their locations in space. There are other companies and consortiums putting together wireless (802.11x) locationing specifications, standards, apps and devices, including "tags" that are tracked on assets by radio frequency identification (RFID). Cisco, IBM and Microsoft are all working on wi-fi locationing tech as well.

The MIT project sounds interesting:

It is turning up some useless/obvious info: students tend to use wireless in the dorms at night and in the early morning, while during the day they tend to log on from classrooms. However, it also is pinpointing some other useful (if still not surprising info): study/computer labs have pretty much lost their usefulness. Students can just go wherever they want to computer. What will be more interesting over time is to see how it really changes the way students do things.

You can view a real-time map of the campus and track the location of volunteers who have wireless devices here.