For decades, social-science experiments were largely limited to laboratory settings. But with the advent of mobile technologies, it is now possible to bring the laboratory “into the wild,” by conducting research that uses mobile technologies to capture real-world data.

UC Berkeley’s Mobile Experimental Social Science Laboratory (also called Xm Lab) exists to help researchers use mobile devices and other sensors as a radically new platform for conducting social science experiments. The lab’s mission is to make the methods of experimental design more accessible to the UC Berkeley community, and to enable researchers to gain insights by using groundbreaking data-gathering methods. Xm Lab is jointly developed by Professors Shachar Kariv, Chair of the Department of Economics, and Raja Sengupta, from Civil and Environmental Engineering.