In industrial countries cell phone usage offers access to patterns of human dynamics and mobility at a level and detail unimaginable before. The purpose of this talk is to quantify the main features of human activity and travel patterns that can be discovered from this data. We start out by testing the standard hypothesis that human activity is fundamentally random in space (travel patterns) and time (inter-event times). We find significant deviations from the random expectation. For the timing of the events the measurements indicate that human activity has a bursty character with well-defined mathematical characteristics, a property shared by a wide range of data, from mobile phone usage to library visitation and emails. In contrast, we find that human travel is far more regular than diffusion models would predict, described mathematically on many spatiotemporal scales a centrally biased random walk. We discuss the implications of these findings on the nature of time and space experienced by humans.
... a fascinating paper (abstract PDF) on "Time and Motion in Mobile Communication", in which he described a project that uses large datasets of mobile phone subscribers to describe analyze how people move about cities. As his abstract states "cell phone usage offers access to patterns of human dynamics and mobility at a level and detail unimaginable before.
Barabasi set out to study human activity using a huge dataset that recorded the time of mobile phone calls and the cell site ID - which allowed them to geolocate the callers to approximately the neighborhood level. They can then create metrics for each individual that describe their movement patterns in space and time - essentially a mobility signature for each person. Then you can look at the overall patterns, and as it turns out, there are significant differences between how different people move.
This kind of analysis has many applications, but on of the most interesting he raised is using it during an epidemic to look at real-time flux of people across parts of a city.
This paper caught my attention because there are a number of interesting research projects that are starting to leverage the mobile as a real-time sensor, to create some very interesting pictures of emergent social phenomena. ... Interestingly enough, it seems that Boston is emerging as the global epicenter for this new research niche.
