Tracking People's Electronic Footprints
In a news article entitled Tracking People's Electronic Footprints (pdf), which appeared in the 10 November 2006 issue of Science, John Bohannon writes about recent advances in the social sciences that are based on the increasing availability of digital records of human interactions, ever growing computer power, and the development of new mathematical models. Many of the specific examples described in the article correspond to research currently being carried out by CABDyN members. In particular, the article discusses: (1) A large-scale study of the weighted social network defined by mobile phone use between 7 million individuals (Jukka-Pekka Onnela and collaborators); (2) A study using data on the 3 million inhabitants of Stockholm above the age of 16 for the period from 1990 to 2003 to examine whether social behaviour such as suicide is contagious and spreads through social networks (Peter Hedstrom and collaborators); (3) A study based on a large dataset which tracks the intensity of terrorist attacks and armed conflicts in Iraq and Colombia over time and shows that the observed universal features can be reproduced by a simple model based on group formation and fragmentation (Neil Johnson, Sean Gourley, and collaborators); (4) A study of the New York garment industry over 20 years which uses a dataset of 700,000 transactions between firms involved in the manufacturing of clothes, in order to understand the dynamic behaviour and resilience of a network undergoing significant contraction (Felix Reed-Tsochas and Serguei Saavedra of CABDyN in collaboration with Brian Uzzi of Northwestern University).

ECCS '06 Webpage