This paper describes the deployment of a large-scale study designed to measure human interactions across a variety of communication channels, with high temporal resolution and spanning multiple years - the Copenhagen Networks Study. Specifically, we collect data on face-to-face interactions, telecommunication, social networks, location, and background information (personality, demographic, health, politics) for a densely connected population of 1,000 individuals, using state-of-art smartphones as social sensors. Here we provide an overview of the related work and describe the motivation and research agenda driving the study. Additionally the paper details the data-types measured, and the technical infrastructure in terms of both backend and phone software, as well as an outline of the deployment procedures. We document the participant privacy procedures and their underlying principles. The paper is concluded with early results from data analysis, illustrating the importance of multi-channel high-resolution approach to data collection.
The COVID-19 outbreak has posed significant threats to international health and the economy. In the absence of treatment for this virus, public health officials asked the public to practice social distancing to reduce the number of physical contacts. However, quantifying social distancing is a challenging task and current methods are based on human movements. We propose a time and cost-effective approach to measure how people practice social distancing. This study proposes a new method based on utilizing the frequency of hashtags supporting and encouraging social distancing for measuring socia…
Social distancing is an important component of the response to the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Minimizing social interactions and travel reduces the rate at which the infection spreads, and "flattens the curve" such that the medical system can better treat infected individuals. However, it remains unclear how the public will respond to these policies. This paper presents the Twitter Social Mobility Index, a measure of social distancing and travel derived from Twitter data. We use public geolocated Twitter data to measure how much a user travels in a given week. We find a large reduc…
Unified framework for measuring segregation resolves how social and geographical space jointly shape connections
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health（哈佛大学陈曾熙公共卫生学院）；Indian Institute of Technology Delhi（印度德里理工学院）
School of Information（信息学院）；UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
We present the task of modeling information propagation in literature, in which we seek to identify pieces of information passing from character A to character B to character C, only given a description of their activity in text. We describe a new pipeline for measuring information propagation in this domain and publish a new dataset for speaker attribution, enabling the evaluation of an important component of this pipeline on a wider range of literary texts than previously studied. Using this pipeline, we analyze the dynamics of information propagation in over 5,000 works of fiction, finding …
Shaped by human movement, place connectivity is quantified by the strength of spatial interactions among locations. For decades, spatial scientists have researched place connectivity, applications, and metrics. The growing popularity of social media provides a new data stream where spatial social interaction measures are largely devoid of privacy issues, easily assessable, and harmonized. In this study, we introduced a global multi-scale place connectivity index (PCI) based on spatial interactions among places revealed by geotagged tweets as a spatiotemporal-continuous and easy-to-implement me…
MIT Media Lab（麻省理工学院媒体实验室）；McCombs School of Business at UT-Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校麦库姆斯商学院）；Harvard University（哈佛大学）
Decision-making on networks can be explained by both homophily and social influence. While homophily drives the formation of communities with similar characteristics, social influence occurs both within and between communities. Social influence can be reasoned through role theory, which indicates that the influences among individuals depend on their roles and the behavior of interest. To operationalize these social science theories, we empirically identify the homophilous communities and use the community structures to capture the "roles", which affect the particular decision-making processes.…
We advance binational link-tracing sampling design, an innovative data collection methodology for sampling from transnational social fields, i.e., transnational networks embedding migrants and non-migrants. This paper shows the practical challenges of such a design, the representativeness of the samples and the qualities of the resulted networks. We performed 303 face-to-face structured interviews on sociodemographic variables, migration trajectories and personal networks of people living in a Romanian migration sending community (Dâmboviţa) and in a migration receiving Spanish town (Castellón…
Measuring the closeness of friendships is an important problem that finds numerous applications in practice. For example, online gaming platforms often host friendship-enhancing events in which a user (called the source) only invites his/her friend (called the target) to play together. In this scenario, the measure of friendship closeness is the backbone for understanding source invitation and target adoption behaviors, and underpins the recommendation of promising targets for the sources. However, most existing measures for friendship closeness only consider the information between the source…
Social media posts may go viral and reach large numbers of people within a short period of time. Such posts may threaten the public dialogue if they contain misleading content, making their early detection highly crucial. Previous works proposed their own metrics to annotate if a tweet is viral or not in order to automatically detect them later. However, such metrics may not accurately represent viral tweets or may introduce too many false positives. In this work, we use the ground truth data provided by Twitter's "Viral Tweets" topic to review the current metrics and also propose our own metr…
High-speed rail (HSR) has become an important mode of inter-city transportation between large cities. Inter-city interaction facilitated by HSR tends to play a more prominent role in promoting urban and regional economic integration and development. Quantifying the impact of HSR's interaction on cities and people is therefore crucial for long-term urban and regional development planning and policy making. We develop an evaluation framework using toponym information from social media as a proxy to estimate the dynamics of such interactions. This paper adopts two types of spatial information: to…
Veracity of data posted on the microblog platforms has in recent years been a subject of intensive study by professionals specializing in various fields of informatics as well as sociology, particularly in the light of increasing importance of online tools for news spreading. On Twitter and similar sites, it is possible to report on ongoing situations globally with minimal delay, while the cost of such reporting remains negligible. One of the most important features of this social network is that content delivery can be customized to allow users to focus only on news items covering subject mat…
Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore possible factors impacting team performance in healthcare, by focusing on information exchange within and across hospital's boundaries. Design/methodology/approach: Through a web-survey and group interviews, the authors collected data on the communication networks of 31 members of four interdisciplinary healthcare teams involved in a system redesign initiative within a large US children's hospital. The authors mapped their internal and external social networks based on management advice, technical support and knowledge dissemination within and a…
It has been observed that real-world social networks often exhibit stratification along economic or other lines, with consequences for class mobility and access to opportunities. With the rise in human interaction data and extensive use of online social networks, the structure of social networks (representing connections between individuals) can be used for measuring stratification. However, although stratification has been studied extensively in the social sciences, there is no single, generally applicable metric for measuring the level of stratification in a network. In this work, we first p…
This paper investigates the research question if senders of large amounts of irrelevant or unsolicited information - commonly called "spammers" - distort the network structure of social networks. Two large social networks are analyzed, the first extracted from the Twitter discourse about a big telecommunication company, and the second obtained from three years of email communication of 200 managers working for a large multinational company. This work compares network robustness and the stability of centrality and interaction metrics, as well as the use of language, after removing spammers and …
This article serves as an introduction to the study of networks of social systems. First, we introduce the reader to key mathematical tools to study social networks, including mathematical representations of networks and essential terminology. We describe several network properties of interest and techniques for measuring these properties. We also discuss some popular generative models of networks and see how the study of these models provides insight into the mechanisms for the emergence of structural patterns. Throughout, we will highlight the patterns that commonly emerge in social networks…
The interaction patterns of employees in social and professional networks play an important role in the success of employees and organizations as a whole. However, in many fields there is a severe under-representation of minority groups; moreover, minority individuals may be segregated from the rest of the network or isolated from one another. While the problem of increasing the representation of minority groups in various fields has been well-studied, diver- sification in terms of numbers alone may not be sufficient: social relationships should also be considered. In this work, we consider th…
Machines in the Crowd? Measuring the Footprint of Machine-Generated Text on Reddit
DIMES Dept., University of Calabria Italy；IT University of Copenhagen\ Centre for AI Denmark；DIMES Dept., University of Calabria；IT University of Copenhagen\ Centre for AI
