Collegiate Times

A team of researchers at Virginia Tech is currently conducting a survey to investigate cell phone calls that were made on April 16.

The group of researchers, led by Andrea Kavanaugh, Steve Sheetz and Francis Quek, is concerned with both incoming and outgoing calls made on that day.

The entire campus community, including students, faculty and staff, was contacted randomly by the Center for Human and Computer Interaction via e-mail and asked to participate.

"Essentially, we want to find out who people contacted and how they contacted them," said Steve Sheetz, associate professor of accounting and information systems.

The survey requests that those contacted retrieve their phone bill from April 16 and answer questions regarding who was contacted, whether they were contacted via call or text message and how many times they attempted to get in touch with family and loved ones. Follow-up interviews will also be requested from some survey participants.

The team is also working loosely with network providers for general information pertaining to the peak phone traffic on that day.

"We don't need individual call data. But the total number of calls per minute or per hour are what we really find to be the most important," Sheetz said.

Andrea Kavanaugh, associate director for the Center for Human and Computer Interaction and team leader of the project, explained that understanding the connection between the people who were contacted is an equally important aspect of their research.

"We want to understand cell phone use on the day of April 16 and measure the strength of the relationship between parents and friends. (We want to find) what the type of communication was between different social ties."

By analyzing the relationships to the callers of the people who were called the most on April 16, the researchers can learn a lot about social interaction.

Both Sheetz and Kavanaugh explained that telephone calls take up much more bandwidth on the network because both parties must be connected simultaneously. If students and faculty use text messaging more than direct calls in an emergency situation, the network may be easier to access in the future.

The survey portion of the team's research is scheduled to conclude on Dec. 7, and they expect to do more complex analysis in the spring.

Pending the results of the survey, the team is optimistic about what can be done for other communities in emergency situations in terms of communication.

"It's very helpful to not just the university and the community of Blacksburg, but there are situations that come up in a number of communities," said Kavanaugh. "We are all a part of social networks, so hopefully our research can help not only Blacksburg and Virginia Tech, but can contribute to situations across the United States and abroad."