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People's daily activities in the urban environment are complex and vary by individuals. Existing studies using mobile phone data revealed distinct and recurrent transitional activity patterns, known as mobility motifs, in people's daily…
The massive amounts of geolocation data collected from mobile phone records has sparked an ongoing effort to understand and predict the mobility patterns of human beings. In this work, we study the extent to which social phenomena are…
Studies using massive, passively data collected from communication technologies have revealed many ubiquitous aspects of social networks, helping us understand and model social media, information diffusion, and organizational dynamics. More…
Urban economic vitality is a crucial indicator of a city's long-term growth potential, comprising key metrics such as the annual number of new companies and the population employed. However, modeling urban economic vitality remains…
Poverty is a multifaceted phenomenon linked to the lack of capabilities of households to earn a sustainable livelihood, increasingly being assessed using multidimensional indicators. Its spatial pattern depends on social, economic,…
This paper studies the role of social networks in spatial mobility across India. Using aggregated and de-identified data from the world's largest online social network, we (i) document new descriptive findings on the structure of social…
While urban systems demonstrate high spatial heterogeneity, many urban planning, economic and political decisions heavily rely on a deep understanding of local neighborhood contexts. We show that the structure of 311 Service Requests…
While benefiting people's daily life in so many ways, smartphones and their location-based services are generating massive mobile device location data that has great potential to help us understand travel demand patterns and make…
Existing urban boundaries are usually defined by government agencies for administrative, economic, and political purposes. Defining urban boundaries that consider socio-economic relationships and citizen commute patterns is important for…
Mobility interventions in communities play a critical role in containing a pandemic at an early stage. The real-world practice of social distancing can enlighten policymakers and help them implement more efficient and effective control…
Internet access is a special resource of which needs has become universal across the public whereas the service is operated in the private sector. Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) put efforts for management, planning, and optimization;…
Online social networks contain a constantly increasing amount of images - most of them focusing on people. Due to cultural and climate factors, fashion trends and physical appearance of individuals differ from city to city. In this paper we…
Large-scale human mobility datasets play increasingly critical roles in many algorithmic systems, business processes and policy decisions. Unfortunately there has been little focus on understanding bias and other fundamental shortcomings of…
Food market accessibility is a critical yet underexplored dimension of food systems, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. In this paper, we present a continent-wide assessment of spatial food market accessibility in Africa,…
Urban mobility is central to economic activity, social inclusion, and access to essential services. COVID-19 caused disruptions to mobility globally, yet its long-term impacts in less developed countries remain poorly understood. Using over…
We introduce a novel machine learning approach to leverage historical and contemporary maps and systematically predict economic statistics. Our simple algorithm extracts meaningful features from the maps based on their color compositions…
By modeling macro-economical indicators using digital traces of human activities on mobile or social networks, we can provide important insights to processes previously assessed via paper-based surveys or polls only. We collected aggregated…
Location data collection has become widespread with smart phones becoming ubiquitous. Smart phone apps often collect precise location data from users by offering \textit{free} services and then monetize it for advertising and marketing…
This study presents a novel demographics informed deep learning framework designed to forecast urban spatial transformations by jointly modeling geographic satellite imagery, socio-demographics, and travel behavior dynamics. The proposed…
The growing homelessness crisis in the U.S. presents complex social, economic, and public health challenges, straining shelters, healthcare, and social services while limiting effective interventions. Traditional assessment methods struggle…