Science

One of my favorite activities is to teach my field or research (network science) to high-schoolers. We (together with my colleague Cristina Brändle) have been doing that from our university to the local high schools in Madrid. Since they know concepts like equations, probability or geometry, it is somehow easy to show them concepts like what is a network, small world, friendship paradox or centrality. We usually have transparencies and allow them to work on Excel to perform some calculations which works well to understand the basic concepts of networks. ...

From the “Small World Experiment” to the “Red Balloon Challenge,” and beyond We live in a small world, right? But the cost and fragility of navigating it could harm any potential strategy to leverage the power of social networks. Read this fascinating story of the research, experiments, and failures in the quest for using social networks to search information/people: [Excerpt of the article] Our ability to search social networks for people and information is fundamental to our success. ...

This is a recent article publish in Medium.com by David Martín-Corral, Manuel Cebrián and myself in which we analyze the super-scaling of touristic attraction (number of events) with population. Amazingly we found that the number of events (music/theater/sports/etc.) scales super-linearly with the population of the city. So yes! more people means more fun! Read the article in Medium

2015 has been an amazing year both on the professional and personal grounds. Here are some of the main things that happened this year: I helped to build up the “Master in Data Science and Big Data in Finance” at the Afi School of Finance. In this first edition we had 18 incredible students and the support from most of the big financial companies in Spain and the best researchers, practitioners and data scientist in the financial industry. ...

A while ago, I wrote a post about how to create animations of temporal networks using R and the amazing package igraph package. The post was written in 2012 and the code does not work with the most recent versions (1.0) of igraph. Here I revisited that post, improving its performance and also making it consistent with the new versions of the package and R. First of all, let me remind you the basic idea: we want to get an animated evolution of a network in which nodes/edges appear (and/or disappear) dynamically. ...

I had the pleasure to organize last edition of Netmob at MIT Media Lab (together with Sandy Pentland, Vincent Blondel and Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye). Netmob is the primary conference in the analysis of those datasets in social, urban, societal and industrial problems. Netmob 2015 also hosted the final part of theD4D Challenge by Orange. They were 3 amazing days of applications and analysis of mobile phone datasets, preceded by one-day school and 3 days Hackathon. ...