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their mobile devices earlier, but more probably use their home Wi-Fi connections
more often.
In both New York and Honk Kong, the daily shape of all activity types is slightly
asymmetric, the maximum activity being reached in the evenings. Surprisingly,
there is an exception with the SMS activity in Hong Kong that appears to
drop earlier than the other activities in the evenings. Rather than a disinterest
from Hong Kongers towards texting in the evening, our guess is that the Hong
Kong SMS signature reveals a great specific interest towards texting during the
day. Text messaging is indeed known to be particularly popular in Asia, where
companies use text messages to confirm deliveries and provide alerts, updates, or
infotainment.
We also observe peaks of SMS activity on evenings in New York. These peaks
could be explained by the important use of SMS for media voting (e.g., on TV
show polls) in the USA like America's Got Talent or X Factor.
At first glance, New York and Hong Kong, while located almost at opposite
places of the globe and having different cultural background, may surprisingly
appear to have more similar signatures than New York and London which share
a common cultural and linguistic background. However we have seen that these
signatures are shaped by many different (technological, economical, or cultural)
factors and that their interpretation must reflect the multiple influences on people's
behaviors. Space is also an important factor to take into account since people do not
behave in the same way depending of where they are.
15.4.3
Comparing Local Signatures
In this section, we go further in our exploration of what we can learn about
people's behaviors based on their communication patterns. After comparing cities'
signatures, we will now compare local signatures from different locations within a
same city.
As shown on Fig.
15.5
a, we selected five different 500m by 500m pixels corre-
sponding to specific locations in London: one pixel in the City of London (the finan-
cial center of London), one centered on Piccadilly Circus (a public space in West-
minster close to major shopping, entertainment, and touristic area), one on Camden
Market (a popular market place where crafts, clothings, and fast food are sold, espe-
cially on weekends), one on Newham (a residential area), and one on Ealing Broad-
way (a travel hub, part of the National Rail and London Underground networks).
Figure
15.5
b shows the signatures of all activity types on each of these five
locations, while Figure
15.5
c highlights the specificities of each location's signature
by displaying their deviation from the whole Greater London's signature.
Similarly to the city level, these five sample signatures display a comparable
day/night cycle, but also present specific characteristics revealing the nature of the
corresponding locations.
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