Science

I am thrilled to announce that I will be joining the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University as a Professor starting January 2024! As a researcher in Social Urban Networks (SUN) it is a dream come true. My group will focus on developing computational social science tools to address urban challenges, from climate change, inequality to health and economic development. By using large datasets of human behavior, tools and ideas from physics, applied mathematics, complex systems or network science, and collaborations with industry, government, and local communities, we seek not only to advance the understanding of the temporal dynamics of social systems to unprecedented levels but also to transform our findings into tools and policies to help achieve resilient and equitable adaptation of our societies. ...

What makes urban labor markets more resilient? This is the question at the heart of a new study we have published in Nature Communications. We drew on prior network modeling research to map the job landscapes in cities across the United States, and showed that job “connectedness” is a key determinant of the resilience of local economies. Economists, policy makers, city planners, and companies have a strong interest in determining what factors contribute to healthy job markets, including what factors can help promote faster recovery after a shock, such as a major recession or the current COVID pandemic. ...

Segregation is hurting our societies and specially our cities. But economic inequality isn’t just limited to neighborhoods. The restaurants, stores, and other places we visit in cities are all unequal in their own way. The Atlas of Inequality shows the income inequality of people who visit different places in the Boston metro area. It uses aggregated anonymous location data from digital devices to estimate people’s incomes and where they spend their time. ...

Another edition of Netmob is happening this year 2019. NetMob is the primary conference in the analysis of mobile phone datasets in social, urban, societal and industrial problems. Previous editions in Boston and Milano brought together more than 250 researchers, practitioners and decision-makers from more 140 institutions and 30 countries. I had the pleasure to organize the 2015 edition and it was a blast to put together so much interesting talks, people, projects. ...

I started using Twitter more than 10 years ago (!). I open an account in this social network in 2008 and although I was not using it too much for the first year, I become a frequent user after that. It has helped me to get news, information both for my personal and professional interests. But not only that, Twitter has been also the data source for our research, that helped us to investigate the relationship between human behavior in the social platform and paramount problems in our society as information propagation, unemployment, disaster damage, political opinion. ...

What are the properties of a long-lasting relationship? This important question as intrigued the social scientists during the last decades and has triggered numerous publications, surveys and experiments to detect what patterns are behind social relationships that persist. Probably the most famous finding is that of Granovetter who proposed that strong relationships are the ones more likely to persist in the future. And what is a strong relationship? According to Granovetter, a strong relationship is that with high intensity (a lot of interactions), intimacy (mutual confiding) and large structural redundancy (lots of common friends). ...