1,720,971 research outputs found
Crime, inequality and public health: a survey of emerging trends in urban data science
No full textUrban agglomerations are constantly and rapidly evolving ecosystems, with globalization and increasing urbanization posing new challenges in sustainable urban development well summarized in the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The advent of the digital age generated by modern alternative data sources provides new tools to tackle these challenges with spatio-temporal scales that were previously unavailable with census statistics. In this review, we present how new digital data sources are employed to provide data-driven insights to study and track (i) urban crime and public safety; (ii) socioeconomic inequalities and segregation; and (iii) public health, with a particular focus on the city scale
Living in a pandemic: changes in mobility routines, social activity and adherence to COVID-19 protective measures
No full textNon-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs), aimed at reducing the diffusion of the COVID-19 pandemic, have dramatically influenced our everyday behaviour. In this work, we study how individuals adapted their daily movements and person-to-person contact patterns over time in response to the NPIs. We leverage longitudinal GPS mobility data of hundreds of thousands of anonymous individuals to empirically show and quantify the dramatic disruption in people’s mobility habits and social behaviour. We find that local interventions did not just impact the number of visits to different venues but also how people experience them. Individuals spend less time in venues, preferring simpler and more predictable routines, also reducing person-to-person contacts. Moreover, we find that the individual patterns of visits are influenced by the strength of the NPIs policies, the local severity of the pandemic and a risk adaptation factor, which increases the people’s mobility regardless of the stringency of interventions. Finally, despite the gradual recovery in visit patterns, we find that individuals continue to keep person-to-person contacts low. This apparent conflict hints that the evolution of policy adherence should be carefully addressed by policymakers, epidemiologists and mobility experts
The Rhythms of Transient Relationships: Allocating time between weekdays and weekends
Full text linkA fundamental question of any new relationship is, will it last? Transient
relationships, recently defined by the authors, are an ideal type of social tie
to explore this question: these relationships are characterized by
distinguishable starting and ending temporal points, linking the question of
tie longevity to relationship finite lifetime. In this study, we use mobile
phone data sets from the UK and Italy to analyze the weekly allocation of time
invested in maintaining transient relationships. We find that more
relationships are created during weekdays, with a greater proportion of them
receiving more contact during these days of the week in the long term. The
smaller group of relationships that receive more phone calls during the weekend
tend to remain active for more time. We uncover a sorting process by which some
ties are moved from weekdays to weekends and vice versa, mostly in the first
half of the relationship. This process also carries more information about the
ultimate lifetime of a tie than the part of the week when the relationship
started, which suggests an early evaluation period that leads to a decision on
how to allocate time to different types of transient ties.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures. Submitted for review at Royal Society Open
Science R
Adaptation of student behavioural routines during Covid-19: a multimodal approach
No full textAbstract One population group that had to significantly adapt and change their behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic is students. While previous studies have extensively investigated the impact of the pandemic on their psychological well-being and academic performance, limited attention has been given to their activity routines. In this work, we analyze students’ behavioural changes by examining qualitative and quantitative differences in their daily routines between two distinct periods (2018 and 2020). Using an Experience Sampling Method (ESM) that captures multimodal self-reported data on students’ activity, locations and sociality, we apply Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) to extract meaningful behavioural components, and quantify the variations in behaviour between students in 2018 and 2020. Surprisingly, despite the presence of COVID-19 restrictions, we find minimal changes in the activities performed by students, and the diversity of activities also remains largely unaffected. Leveraging the richness of the data at our disposal, we discover that activities adaptation to the pandemic primarily occurred in the location and sociality dimensions
The Stability of Transient Relationships
Full text linkIn contrast to long-term relationships, far less is known about the temporal
evolution of transient relationships, although these constitute a substantial
fraction of people's communication networks. Previous literature suggests that
ratings of relationship emotional intensity decay gradually until the
relationship ends. Using mobile phone data from three countries (US, UK, and
Italy), we demonstrate that the volume of communication between ego and its
transient alters does not display such a systematic decay, instead showing a
lack of any dominant trends. This means that the communication volume of egos
to groups of similar transient alters is stable. We show that alters with
longer lifetimes in ego's network receive more calls, with the lifetime of the
relationship being predictable from call volume within the first few weeks of
first contact. This is observed across all three countries, which include
samples of egos at different life stages. The relation between early call
volume and lifetime is consistent with the suggestion that individuals
initially engage with a new alter so as to evaluate their potential as a tie in
terms of homophily.Comment: Published in Scientific Reports 13, 6120 (2023
Investigating individual traits, network dynamics and economic behavior using mobile phone data
No full textRecent years have witnessed a growing interest in analyzing the huge amount of human behavioral data generated by new technologies such as mobile phones, social media and credit cards. These technologies leave a trail of "digital breadcrumbs" that allow us to have new quantitative insights that may reveal patterns of individual and group behaviors. Moreover, it allows us to better understand human behavior at a fine-grained resolution and for periods of time that were previously inconceivable. Researchers can now observe human behavior, ask research questions and run experiments in ways that were simply impossible in the recent past due to qualitative methods that, despite their undeniable benefits, proved to be time and resource consuming and therefore difficult to apply to large scale studies.
Studying social interaction and social networks extracted from these data sources, allow us to understand not only individual behaviors and their characteristics, but also to observe the relationships between individuals, the structure, the content and their dynamics over long periods of time. Given the capacity of mobile phones to capture real observations of communications between people, we took advantage of the data collected from these devices to further explore and investigate human behavior.
Specifically, in this dissertation, we (i) present the Mobile Territorial Lab (MTL) project and illustrate the advantages of using a living lab approach to collect a longitudinal set of data from a target group of parents; (ii) investigate how the personality dispositions of an individual influence how (s)he manages her/his social network; (iii) investigate whether and how the behavior of an individual as sensed through her/his mobile phone behavior is related to the future adoption and use of the leading mobile money service M-Pesa
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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