I am interested in the convergence of the digital and the physical driven by the adoption of personal networked devices, wearable sensors and the ensuing multiplication of behavioral proxies. I work with data on digitally-sensed/mediated human behaviors, such as mobility and proximity, targeting research questions in computational social science and digital epidemiology. I use concepts and models from complex systems science and network science together with methods from data mining and machine learning. I am interested in the social impact of data science and the public-interest use of privately held data.
Interests
High-Resolution Social Networks. I am a founder and PI of the SocioPatterns international collaboration, that uses wearable proximity sensors to map human spatial behavior in a variety of environments such as schools, hospitals, offices, social gatherings, emergency response exercises, and more. During the last 10 years we have designed and supervised over 30 data collection campaigns in 12 countries, involving over 50,000 subjects. The resulting large-scale datasets were used to investigate human mobility, time-varying complex networks, homophily in social networks, and more. The data we shared with the public were used in over 500 papers.
Digital Epidemiology. I am interested in measuring high-resolution human and animal contact networks and integrating them into computational models of infectious disease dynamics. In the context of the SocioPatterns collaboration we have measured high-resolution contact networks in schools and hospitals, building computational models of flu-like disease spread, designing mitigation strategies and summarized data representations for structured populations, as well as relating contact patterns to nosocomial infections. We have carried out measurement in challenging environments such as households in developing countries, communities of free-roaming animals, and more.
Online Social Networks and Web Science. I have carried out research on collaborative tagging systems, on information networks from social annotations, on the relation between information networks and human semantics, and on topic popularity. I am interested in the use of tensor decompositions for signal extraction in time-varying networks, with applications to topic detection in information streams and structure detection in time-varying networks. I am a founder and PI of the DataInterfaces collaboration, which develops interactive data visualization tools to connect data and people.
Research Projects
[co-founder, co-PI] SocioPatterns ‐ high-resolution social networks
[co-founder, co-PI] DataInterfaces ‐ interfaces between data and people
PERISCOPE – Pan-European Response to the ImpactS of COVID-19 and future Pandemics and Epidemics
EPIPOSE – Epidemic intelligence to minimize 2019-nCoV’s public health, economic and social impact in Europe
Multiplex – Foundational Research on Multi-level Complex Networks
PREDEMICS – Preparedness, Prediction and Prevention of Emerging Zoonotic Viruses
KNOWeSCAPE – Analyzing the Dynamics of Information and Knowledge Landscapes
StudioLab – a European Platform for Creative Interactions between Art and Science