This could be a big holiday season for mobile advertising as more retailers aim location-based ads at consumers with smartphones, according to Sense Networks, a six-year-old company whose executives include folks who studied data science at MIT.

One company executive is Alex “Sandy” Pentland, who directs the Human Dynamics Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program. Several years ago, Pentland realized that the large amounts of location data being collected by mobile phones and GPS devices could be useful information for businesses trying to be more efficient in targeting their customers with ads.