Mobility

Authors: Shenhao Wang, Yunhan Zheng, Guang Wang, Takahiro Yabe, Esteban Moro & Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland Publication: Nature Cities 10.1038/s44284-024-00051-7. LINK Abstract: Many studies have revealed the predictive power of the most frequent, regular and habitual mobility patterns. However, it remains unclear which components of the mobility patterns contain the most informative signals for predicting disparate economic development across urban areas. Here we use machine learning to predict economic outcomes by analyzing the heterogeneous mobility networks of 687 activities from more than 560,000 anonymized users in Boston, Chicago and Miami. ...

Authors: Bernardo Garcia-Bulle, Abigail L. Horn, Brooke M. Bell, Mohsen Bahrami, Burcin Bozkaya, Alex Pentland, Kayla de la Haye, and Esteban Moro Publication: Nature Communications 15, article number: 2291. LINK Abstract: Poor diets are a leading cause of morbidity and mortality. Exposure to low-quality food environments saturated with fast food outlets is hypothesized to negatively impact diet. However, food environment research has predominantly focused on static food environments around home neighborhoods and generated mixed findings. ...

Authors: Marco Pangallo, Alberto Aleta, R. Maria del Rio-Chanona, Anton Pichler, David Martin-Corral, Matteo Chinazzi, Francois Lafond, Marco Ajelli, Esteban Moro, Yamir Moreno, Alessandro Vespignani, J. Doyne Farmer Publication: Nature Human Behavior, Nov 16th, (2023) LINK Abstract: Despite the global impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, the question of whether mandated interventions have similar economic and public health effects as spontaneous behavioural change remains unresolved. Addressing this question, and understanding differential effects across socioeconomic groups, requires building quantitative and fine-grained mechanistic models. ...

Authors: Abigail L. Horn, Brooke M. Bell, Bernardo Garcia Bulle Bueno, Mohsen Bahrami, Burcin Bozkaya, Yan Cui, John P. Wilson, Alex Pentland, Esteban Moro, Kayla de la Haye Publication: NPJ Digital Medicine 6, 208 (2023) LINK Abstract: The characteristics of food environments people are exposed to, such as the density of fast food (FF) outlets, can impact their diet and risk for diet-related chronic disease. Previous studies examining the relationship between food environments and nutritional health have produced mixed findings, potentially due to the predominant focus on static food environments around people’s homes. ...

Authors: Yanni Yang, Alex Pentland, Esteban Moro Publication: EPJ Data Science 12, Article number: 15 (2023) LINK Abstract: Urbanization and its problems require an in-depth and comprehensive understanding of urban dynamics, especially the complex and diversified lifestyles in modern cities. Digitally acquired data can accurately capture complex human activity, but it lacks the interpretability of demographic data. In this paper, we study a privacy-enhanced dataset of the mobility visitation patterns of 1. ...

Authors: Takahiro Yabe, Bernardo García Bulle Bueno, Xiaowen Dong, Alex Pentland & Esteban Moro Publication: Nature Communications volume 14, Article number: 2310 (2023) LINK Abstract: Diversity of physical encounters in urban environments is known to spur economic productivity while also fostering social capital. However, mobility restrictions during the pandemic have forced people to reduce urban encounters, raising questions about the social implications of behavioral changes. In this paper, we study how individual income diversity of urban encounters changed during the pandemic, using a large-scale, privacy-enhanced mobility dataset of more than one million anonymized mobile phone users in Boston, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Seattle, across three years spanning before and during the pandemic. ...