High-resolution human mobility: from face-to-face interactions to the urban scale

Ciro Cattuto

Scientific Director ISI Foundation

Martedì 15 gennaio 2019

ore 16.00 – 18.00

Sala Conferenze “Luigi Ciminiera” del Dipartimento di Automatica e Informatica del Politecnico, Corso Castelfidardo 34/D, Torino (Map)

Digital technologies and advanced analytics provide the opportunity to quantify specific human behaviors with unprecedented levels of detail and scale. Personal electronic devices and wearable sensors, in particular, can be used to map the network structure of human mobility and proximity in environments relevant for research in computational social science, urban mobility and public health. In the first part of this talk I will review the experience of the SocioPatterns collaboration, a decade-long international effort, led by my team, aimed at studying high-resolution human social networks using wearable sensors in important settings such as schools, hospitals, and low-resource rural environments.

I will illustrate the network structures observed in empirical data, reflect on generalization and data incompleteness, and review modeling approaches based on ideas from network science and machine learning. In the second part of the talk I will shift to the scale of an entire city, discussing the opportunities – and limitations – of using call Detail Record (CDR) data from telephone operators to map urban mobility and socio-economic conditions. I will compare traditional data sources, such as census data and origin-destination surveys, with digital proxies for urban mobility, and I will specifically focus on novel perspectives enabled by gender-disaggregated CDR data. I will close with a reflection on the challenges and promises of using privately-held data for the public interest.

Biography

Dr. Ciro CATTUTO is the Scientific Director of ISI Foundation (Torino, Italy and New York, NY). His research focuses on measuring and modeling complex phenomena in systems that entangle human behaviours and digital platforms. He a founder and principal investigator of the SocioPatterns collaboration, an international effort on studying social networks with wearable sensors to advance research in computational epidemiology and computational social science. Dr. Cattuto holds a PhD in Physics from the University of Perugia, Italy and has carried out interdisciplinary research at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, USA, at Sapienza University in Rome, and at the Frontier Research System of the RIKEN Institute in Japan. He is an adjunct professor at the University of Torino and at Sapienza University, and an Academic Board member of the Data Science and Computation PhD program of the University of Bologna. Dr. Cattuto is an editorial board member of the EPJ Data Science and Nature Scientific Data journals and has been an organizer and chair of several leading conferences in Computer Science, Network Science and Complex Systems.

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