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In-Depth Information
15
A Complexity Science Perspective
on Human Mobility
Fosca Giannotti, Luca Pappalardo, Dino Pedreschi, and Dashun Wang
Fueled by big data collected by a wide range of high-throughput tools and
technologies, a new wave of data-driven, interdisciplinary science has rapidly
proliferated during the past decade, impacting a wide array of disciplines, from
physics and computer science to cell biology and economics. In particular,
the ICTs are inundating us with huge amounts of information about human
activities, offering access to observing and measuring human behavior at an
unprecedented level of detail. These large-scale data sets, offering objective
description of human activity patterns, have started to reshape, and are expected
to fundamentally alter, our discussions on quantifying and understanding human
behavior. An impressive shift has been witnessed in statistical physics and
complex system theory since the beginning of the new millennium, when the
possibility of analyzing large data sets of human activities and social interactions
boosted a renewed interest in the study of human mobility on one side, and of
social networks on the other side.
The understanding of how objects move, and humans in particular, is a
longstanding challenge in the natural sciences, since the seminal observations by
Robert Brown in the nineteenth century, but it has attracted particular interest in
recent years, due to the data availability and to the relevance of the topic in various
domains, from urban planning and virus spreading to emergency response. A
first contribution of this chapter is to provide a brief account of this body of
research, with a focus on the recent results on the empirical laws that govern
the individual mobility patterns: we discuss how the key variables of people's
travels (such as length, duration, and radius of gyration) follow universal laws,
validated against different data sets of real observations. We also discuss how
predictable people's movements are, illustrating recent findings indicating that
the high degree of predictability of human motion is a universal characteristic
of every individual, despite the wide variety of individual whereabouts.
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