Big Data

Inequality is one of the most important problems in our societies. For example, economic inequality is today higher than it was in the 1970’s and by some metrics stands at levels not seen since the last Great Depression. A special form of segregation is that happening in our cities. We share the public places, our workplaces and our residential neighborhoods with people like us: same type of jobs, same education, similar economic status, and political opinions. ...

We live in a networked society and our actions, opinions, behaviors are affected and can affect other people. Understanding such social networked structures is one of the key challenges in our attempt to decode human behavior and its impact in our society. Although human interactions are dynamical by nature, most of our understanding relies in static representations of those social networks. However, social interactions are rarely static. Very often the networks evolve by means of processes that happen at diverse time scales, like link decay/formation, group formation, etc. ...

Authors: David Garcia, Yonas Mitike Kassa, Angel Cuevas, Manuel Cebrian, Esteban Moro, Iyad Rahwan, and Ruben Cuevas Journal: PNAS June 19, 2018. 201717781. LINK Abstract: Online social media are information resources that can have a transformative power in society. While the Web was envisioned as an equalizing force that allows everyone to access information, the digital divide prevents large amounts of people from being present online. Online social media, in particular, are prone to gen- der inequality, an important issue given the link between social media use and employment. ...

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. ...

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

Human decision making strategies evolve through time based on past experience and they are influence by the spectrum of other strategies with which they come into contact. Financial markets provide the best empirical lab to understand how human decide under risk and uncertainty. They are complex systems which provide massive datasets of detail records of human decisions which constantly evolve and collide in centralized or social structures. Furthermore financial markets provide us with a very simple measure of performance (profits, ROI), thus enabling us to study the relationship between human decision making strategies and performance. ...