Are connected individuals birds of a feather?

by Joachim Mathiesen (Niels Bohr Institutet, Copenhagen)

Tuesday 8 Sept 2015, 13:30 → 14:30 Europe/Stockholm

Using data from smartphones and social media, we analyze and model human activity patterns both on the individual scale and in massive social organizations. In the latter case, the activity of users of social media, typically excited by real-world events and measured by the occurrence rate of international brand names, is characterized by intermittent fluctuations with bursts of high activity separated by quiescent periods. These fluctuations are broadly distributed with an inverse cubic tail and have long-range temporal correlations. We describe the activity by a stochastic point process and derive the distribution of activity levels from the corresponding stochastic differential equation. The smartphone data are collected as part of the Social Fabric project at University of Copenhagen where 1000 smartphones have been distributed to freshman classes at the Technical University of Denmark. Questionnaire data on basic personality traits have been compared to activity patterns sampled from the GPS, Bluetooth sensor, or the call logs of the smartphones. I will in the presentation discuss to which degree interacting individual have a tendency to be similar.

This talk is organized in the Center for Quantum Materials seminar series.