Mobile Phone Data

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: Yan Leng , Xiaowen Dong, Esteban Moro, Alex Pentland Publication: Information Systems Research, Articles in Advance 21 Jun (2023) LINK Abstract: We use high-resolution mobile phone data with geolocation information and pro- pose a novel technical framework to study how social influence propagates within a phone communication network and affects the offline decision to attend a performance event. Our fine-grained data are based on the universe of phone calls made in a European country between January and July 2016. ...

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. ...

Authors: Zhuangyuan Fan, Tianyu Su, Maoran Sun, Ariel Noyman, Fan Zhang, Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland, Esteban Moro Publication: PNAS Nexus, Volumen 2, Issue 4, pgad077, 2023 LINK Abstract: Urban density, in the form of residents’ and visitors’ concentration, is long considered to foster diverse exchanges of interpersonal knowledge and skills, which are intrinsic to sustainable human settlements. However, with current urban studies primarily devoted to city- and district-level analyses, we cannot unveil the elemental connection between urban density and diversity. ...

Authors:Esteban Moro Publication: ZARCH, 19, 28–39. 2023 LINK Abstract: Cities are the main ground on which our society and culture develop today and will evolve in the future. Against the traditional understanding of cities as physical spaces mostly around our neighborhoods, recent use of large-scale mobility datasets has enabled the study of our behavior at unprecedented spatial and temporal scales, much beyond our static residential spaces. Here we show how it is possible to use these datasets to investigate the role that human behavior plays in traditional urban problems like segregation, public health, or epidemics. ...