Social Urban Networks

Introduction Unless you have been away for the last month, you, your family or friends have been talking about or playing Wordle. It is a very straightforward game which reminds us (old enough) of the great MasterMind, but with words. The idea is very simple. In the original version by Josh Wardle, we try to guess a (English) word of five letters. After each guess the game shows you what letters are in the answer in the right position (green), in the answer but in a wrong position (yellow) or not in the answer at all (gray). ...

Authors: Iñaki Ucar, Marco Gramaglia, Marco Fiore, Zbigniew Smoreda, and Esteban Moro Publication: J. R. Soc. Interface (2021). Link Abstract: Reliable and timely information on socio-economic status and divides is critical to social and economic research and policing. Novel data sources from mobile communication platforms have enabled new cost-effective approaches and models to investigate social disparity, but their lack of interpretability, accuracy or scale has limited their relevance to date. ...

Authors: Esteban Moro, Dan Calacci, Xiaowen Dong & Alex Pentland. Publication: Nature Communications 12, 4633 (2021). Link Abstract: Traditional understanding of urban income segregation is largely based on static coarse grained residential patterns. However, these do not capture the income segregation experience implied by the rich social interactions that happen in places that may relate to individual choices, opportunities, and mobility behavior. Using a large-scale high-resolution mobility data set of 4. ...

Authors: Ruth F. Hunter, Leandro Garcia, Thiago Herick de Sa, Belen Zapata-Diomedi, Christopher Millett, James Woodcock, Alex ’Sandy’ Pentland, and Esteban Moro Publication: Nature Communications (2021). Link Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic is causing mass disruption to our daily lives. We integrate mobility data from mobile devices and area-level data to study the walking patterns of 1.62 million anonymous users in 10 metropolitan areas in the United States. The data covers the period from mid-February 2020 (pre-lockdown) to late June 2020 (easing of lockdown restrictions). ...