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All online sharing systems gather data that reflects users' collective behaviour and their shared activities. This data can be used to extract different kinds of relationships, which can be grouped into layers, and which are basic…
In this paper, we investigate the phenomenon of "age-specific small worlds" using data from a large-scale mobile communication network approximating interaction patterns at societal scale. Rather than asking whether two random individuals…
Social media is considered a democratic space in which people connect and interact with each other regardless of their gender, race, or any other demographic aspect. Despite numerous efforts that explore demographic aspects in social media,…
We introduce WebChain, the largest open-source dataset of human-annotated trajectories on real-world websites, designed to accelerate reproducible research in web agents. It contains 31,725 trajectories and 318k steps, featuring a core…
A day in the life of a person involves a broad range of activities which are common across many people. Going beyond diurnal cycles, a central question is: to what extent do individuals act according to patterns shared across an entire…
The ever increasing adoption of mobile technologies and ubiquitous services allows to sense human behavior at unprecedented levels of details and scale. Wearable sensors are opening up a new window on human mobility and proximity at the…
AI agents that communicate on behalf of individuals need to capture how each person actually communicates, yet current approaches either require costly per-person fine-tuning, produce generic outputs from shallow persona descriptions, or…
We recently measured the average distance of users in the Facebook graph, spurring comments in the scientific community as well as in the general press ("Four Degrees of Separation"). A number of interesting criticisms have been made about…
Task-oriented conversational systems are essential for efficiently addressing diverse user needs, yet their development requires substantial amounts of high-quality conversational data that is challenging and costly to obtain. While large…
Social systems are in a constant state of flux with dynamics spanning from minute-by-minute changes to patterns present on the timescale of years. Accurate models of social dynamics are important for understanding spreading of influence or…
This paper investigates human dynamics in a large online dating site with 3,000 new users daily who stay in the system for 3 months on the average. The daily activity is also quite large such as 500,000 massage transactions, 5,000 photo…
The appearance of large geolocated communication datasets has recently increased our understanding of how social networks relate to their physical space. However, many recurrently reported properties, such as the spatial clustering of…
It is a fundamental question in epidemiology to estimate, model and predict the growth rate of a pandemic. Analogously, analysing the diffusion of innovation, (fake) news, memes, and rumours is of key importance in the social sciences. The…
Modern mix networks improve over Tor and provide stronger privacy guarantees by robustly obfuscating metadata. As long as a message is routed through at least one honest mixnode, the privacy of the users involved is safeguarded. However,…
The analysis of social networks, in particular those describing face-to-face interactions between individuals, is complex due to the intertwining of the topological and temporal aspects. We revisit them both, using public data recorded by…
Have we become more tolerant of dating people of different social backgrounds compared to ten years ago? Has the rise of online dating exacerbated or alleviated gender inequalities in modern courtship? Are the most attractive people on…
We consider the duration of discussions in face-to-face contacts and propose a stochastic model to describe it. It is based on the points of a Levy flight where the duration of each contact corresponds to the size of the clusters produced…
Nowadays, millions of people interact on a daily basis on online social media like Facebook and Twitter, where they share and discuss information about a wide variety of topics. In this paper, we focus on a specific online social network,…
We introduce the concept of communicability angle between a pair of nodes in a graph. We provide strong analytical and empirical evidence that the average communicability angle for a given network accounts for its spatial efficiency on the…
Mobile phone datasets allow for the analysis of human behavior on an unprecedented scale. The social network, temporal dynamics and mobile behavior of mobile phone users have often been analyzed independently from each other using mobile…