Related papers: Disentangling collective trends from local dynamic…
Cities can be characterised and modelled through different urban measures. Consistency within these observables is crucial in order to advance towards a science of cities. Bettencourt et al have proposed that many of these urban measures…
Models and simulations of collective behaviours are often based on considering them as assumed by interactive particle systems. The focus is then on behavioural and interaction rules by using approaches based on artificial agents designed…
To what extent can the strength of a local urban community impact neighborhood safety? We construct measures of community vibrancy based on a unique dataset of block party permit approvals from the City of Philadelphia. Our first measure…
The curves of scaling behavior is a significant concept in fractal dimension analysis of complex systems. However, the underlying rationale of this kind of curves for fractal cities is not yet clear. The aim of this paper is at researching…
We develop new econometric methods for the comparison of nonparametric time trends. In many applications, practitioners are interested in whether the observed time series all have the same time trend. Moreover, they would often like to know…
Culturomics was recently introduced as the application of high-throughput data collection and analysis to the study of human culture. Here we make use of this data by investigating fluctuations in yearly usage frequencies of specific words…
Geographic patterns in stroke mortality have been studied as far back as the 1960s, when a region of the southeastern United States became known as the "stroke belt" due to its unusually high rates of stroke mortality. While stroke…
The amount of data that is being gathered about cities is increasing in size and specificity. However, despite this wealth of information, we still have little understanding of what really drives the processes behind urbanisation. In this…
Human mobility is known to be distributed across several orders of magnitude of physical distances , which makes it generally difficult to endogenously find or define typical and meaningful scales. Relevant analyses, from movements to…
In complex systems, events occur at irregular intervals that inherently encode the underlying dynamics of the system. Analyzing the temporal clustering of these events reveals critical insights into the non-random patterns and the temporal…
Dynamical processes on time-varying complex networks are key to understanding and modeling a broad variety of processes in socio-technical systems. Here we focus on empirical temporal networks of human proximity and we aim at understanding…
In this thesis we contribute to the understanding of the pivotal role of the temporal dimension in networked social systems, previously neglected and now uncovered by the data revolution recently blossomed in this field. To this aim, we…
The way we eat and what we eat, the way we move and the way we sleep significantly impact the risk of becoming obese. These aspects of behavior decompose into several personal behavioral elements including our food choices, eating place…
We study the statistics of quantum transmission through a one-dimensional disordered system modelled by a sequence of independent scattering units. Each unit is characterized by its length and by its action, which is proportional to the…
We present a strategy capable of describing basic features of the dynamics of crowds. The behaviour of the crowd is considered from a twofold perspective. We examine both the large scale behaviour of the crowd, and phenomena happening at…
Ignoring the differences between countries, human reproductive and dispersal behaviors can be described by some standardized models, so whether there is a universal law of population growth hidden in the abundant and unstructured data from…
The evolution of many dynamical systems that describe relationships or interactions between objects can be effectively modeled by temporal networks, which are typically represented as a sequence of static network snapshots. In this paper,…
This chapter examines the possibility to analyze and compare human activities in an urban environment based on the detection of mobile phone usage patterns. Thanks to an unprecedented collection of counter data recording the number of…
Ten years ago we presented a modified version of Okun law for the biggest developed economies and reported its excellent predictive power. In this study, we revisit the original models using the estimates of real GDP per capita and…
Revealing the ongoing changes in ocean dynamics and their impact on marine ecosystems requires the joint analysis of multiple variables. Yet, global observational records only cover a few decades, posing a challenge in the separation of…