Publications

I have published 105 articles/preprints 2025 Using human mobility data to quantify experienced urban inequalities Fengli Xu, Qi Wang, Esteban Moro, Lin Chen, Arianna Salazar Miranda, Marta C Gonzalez, Michele Tizzoni, Chaoming Song, Carlo Ratti, Luis Bettencourt, others Nature Human Behaviour NA 1–11 (2025) PDF Journal Worse Weather Amplifies Social Media Activity Kelton Minor, Esteban Moro, Nick Obradovich Psychological Science NA 09567976241306099 (2025) PDF Journal Human mobility is well described by closed-form gravity-like models learned automatically from data ...

Authors: Fengli Xu, Qi Wang, Esteban Moro, Arianna Salazar Miranda, Marta C. González, Chaoming Song, Carlo Ratti, Luis Bettencourt, James Evans Publication: Nature Human Behavior (2025) LINK Abstract: The lived experience of urban life is shaped by personal mobility through dynamic relationships and resources, marked not only by access and opportunity, but also inequality and segregation. The recent availability of fine-grained mobility data and context attributes ranging from venue type to demographic mixture offer researchers a deeper understanding of experienced inequalities at scale, and pose many new questions. ...

Authors: Oriol Cabanas-Tirapu, Lluís Danús, Esteban Moro, Marta Sales-Pardo & Roger Guimerà Publication: Nature Communications 16, 1336 (2025). LINK Abstract: Modeling human mobility is critical to address questions in urban planning, sustainability, public health, and economic development. However, our understanding and ability to model flows between urban areas are still incomplete. At one end of the modeling spectrum we have gravity models, which are easy to interpret but provide modestly accurate predictions of flows. ...

Authors: Takahiro Yabe, Bernardo García Bulle Bueno, Morgan R Frank, Alex Pentland, Esteban Moro Publication: Nature Human Behavior (2024) LINK Abstract: Disruptions, such as closures of businesses during pandemics, not only affect businesses and amenities directly but also influence how people move, spreading the impact to other businesses and increasing the overall economic shock. However, it is unclear how much businesses depend on each other during disruptions. Leveraging human mobility data and same-day visits in five US cities, we quantify dependencies between points of interest encompassing businesses, stores and amenities. ...

Authors: Takahiro Yabe, Massimiliano Luca, Kota Tsubouchi, Bruno Lepri, Marta C. Gonzalez & Esteban Moro Publication: Nature Computational Science (2024). doi: 10.1038/s43588-024-00650-3 LINK Abstract: Human mobility research intersects with various disciplines, with profound implications for urban planning, transportation engineering, public health, disaster management, and economic analysis. Here, we discuss the urgent need for open and standardized datasets in the field, including current challenges and lessons from other computational science domains, and propose collaborative efforts to enhance the validity and reproducibility of human mobility research. ...

Authors: David Martín-Corral, Manuel García-Herranz, Manuel Cebrián & Esteban Moro Publication: EPJ Data Science (2024) 13:43 LINK Abstract: Detecting early signals of an outbreak in a viral process is challenging due to its exponential nature, yet crucial given the benefits to public health it can provide. If available, the network structure where infection happens can provide rich information about the very early stages of viral outbreaks. For example, more central nodes have been used as social network sensors in biological or informational diffusion processes to detect early contagious outbreaks. ...