Social Urban Networks

Authors: Patrick Baylis, Nick Obradovich, Yury Kryvasheyeu, Haohui Chen, Lorenzo Coviello, Esteban Moro, Manuel Cebrian, James H. Fowler Journal: PLoS ONE 13(4): e0195750 (2018) LINK Abstract: We conduct the largest ever investigation into the relationship between meteorological con- ditions and the sentiment of human expressions. To do this, we employ over three and a half billion social media posts from tens of millions of individuals from both Facebook and Twitter between 2009 and 2016. ...

Authors: Abhimanyu Dubey, Esteban Moro, Manuel Cebrian, Iyad Rahwan Journal: WWW'18 Proceedings of the Web Conference 2018 LINK Abstract: The analysis of the creation, mutation, and propagation of social media content on the Internet is an essential problem in computational social science, affecting areas ranging from marketing to political mobilization. A first step towards understanding the evolution of images online is the analysis of rapidly modifying and propagating memetic imagery or ‘memes’. ...

Report in Magazine (in Spanish) about the work done by different groups at the MIT MediaLab, including ours! Media Lab, el lugar donde se inventa el futuro “Aquí no se busca un éxito incremental en los proyectos, como sucede en muchas universidades, ni tampoco desarrollos a largo plazo, sino que tratan de dar con moonshots, es decir, aspectos que a largo plazo pueden impactar en la sociedad. No hay departamentos. ...

Article in El País (in Spanish) about how algorithms are now the big asset of companies, agencies and researchers to transform data into value La era del algoritmo ha llegado y tus datos son un tesoro “La primera revolución llegó hace unos años con el almacenamiento de inmensas cantidades de datos procedentes de las huellas electrónicas que todos dejamos. La segunda, en la que estamos inmersos, procede de la capacidad que tanto empresarios como usuarios o investigadores tienen para analizar estos datos. ...

Article (in Spanish) in MIT Technology Review (and the Sacyr innovation blog) about how automation is going to impact differently big or small cities. Soluciones para ciudades grandes y pequeñas ante la automatización de empleos La razón principal para que la automatización ataque más a los núcleos pequeños se debe a la propia naturaleza de los empleos disponibles en cada tipo de urbe. Las ciudades más pequeñas tienen más profesiones rutinarias y repetitivas, “como las tareas de servicios, labores mecánicas, fábricas y agricultura, que son susceptibles de ser automatizadas”, apunta el investigador del Media Lab y profesor de la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid Esteban Moro. ...

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). ...