Social Urban Networks

This episode of the Spanish television program El Cazador de cerebros show the uses of Big Data in social problems. Shot at MIT Medialab, I share the episode with friends like Manuel García Herranz (who works and shows much cooler things that I do.) El Cazador de Cerebros

Video of my talk “The lifetime of strong ties in social networks” at the Northwestern Institute of Complex Systems (NICO) in Evaston, Chicago, Oct 2017. What a great experience giving a talk at NICO!

Authors: Henry Navarro, Giovanna Miritello, Arturo Canales, Esteban Moro Journal: EPJ Data Science (2017) 6:31 LINK Abstract: Social networks are made out of strong and weak ties having very different structural and dynamical properties. But what features of human interaction build a strong tie? Here we approach this question from a practical way by finding what are the properties of social interactions that make ties more persistent and thus stronger to maintain social interactions in the future. ...

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. ...

Authors: Farshad Kooti, Esteban Moro, and Kristina Lerman Journal: Proceedings of SocInfo 2016 LINK Abstract: Human behavior shows strong daily, weekly, and monthly patterns. In this work, we demonstrate online behavioral changes that occur on a much smaller time scale: minutes, rather than days or weeks. Specifically, we study how people distribute their effort over different tasks during periods of activity on the Twitter social platform. We demonstrate that later in a session on Twitter, people prefer to per- form simpler tasks, such as replying and retweeting others’ posts, rather than composing original messages, and they also tend to post shorter messages. ...

Nice article (in Spanish) in Yorokobu magazine about the use of Twitter in science, highlighting our work on the use of social media for rapid assessment of natural disaster management El romance entre Twitter y la ciencia «Twitter y las otras redes sociales están entre los más grandes archivos de actividad humana existentes y, al contrario que con las encuestas, ahora tenemos la posibilidad de analizar millones de mensajes, opiniones e interacciones de personas en diferentes contextos como la política, economía o el ocio», explica el matemático Esteban Moro, investigador en la Carlos III de Madrid. ...