{"id":2941,"date":"2015-02-27T06:43:25","date_gmt":"2015-02-27T06:43:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revoscience.com\/en\/?p=2941"},"modified":"2015-02-27T06:43:25","modified_gmt":"2015-02-27T06:43:25","slug":"social-circles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/social-circles\/","title":{"rendered":"Social circles"},"content":{"rendered":"

MIT study details the degree to which urban movement is linked to social activity.<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\"MIT<\/a>
MIT researchers have created a new model of how much urban travel is based on social activity, which may help urban planners estimate how people move around cities.
Courtesy of the researchers (edited by MIT News)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. —\u00a0If you live in a city, you know that a fair amount of your movement around town is social in nature. But how much, exactly? A new study co-authored by MIT researchers uses a new method to infer that around one-fifth of urban movement is strictly social, a finding that holds up consistently in multiple cities.<\/span><\/p>\n

The study used anonymized phone data that, unlike most data in the field, provides information that can be used to reconstruct both people\u2019s locations and their social networks. By linking this information together, the researchers were able to build a picture indicating which networks were primarily social, as opposed to work-oriented, and then deduce how much city movement was due to social activity.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAdding two data sources \u2014 one on the social side and one on the mobility side \u2014 and layering them one on top of each other gives you something that\u2019s a little bit greater,\u201d says Jameson Toole, a PhD student in MIT\u2019s Engineering Systems Division, and one of the authors of a newly published paper outlining the study\u2019s results.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a way to look at the data that wasn\u2019t done before,\u201d says Marta Gonzalez, an assistant professor in MIT\u2019s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and another co-author of the study.<\/span><\/p>\n

By developing a new means of quantifying how much urban travel is based on social activity, the researchers believe they have started creating a new analytical tool that could be of use to planners and policymakers.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThere are a lot of people who need to have estimates of how people move around cities: transportation planners, and other urban planners,\u201d Toole says. \u201cBut a lot of data-driven models don\u2019t take into account social behavior. What we found is that \u2026 if you are trying to estimate movement in a city and you don\u2019t include the social component, your estimates are going to be off by about 20 percent.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Going mobile<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

The paper, \u201cCoupling human mobility and social ties,\u201d is appearing this week in\u00a0Interface<\/em>, a peer-reviewed journal published by the Royal Society. The co-authors are Toole, who is the lead author; Carlos Herrer-Yaque, of the Universidad Polytecnica in Madrid; Gonzalez, who is the principal investigator on the study; and Christian Schneider, an MIT post-doctoral researcher during the course of the study.<\/span><\/p>\n

The study\u2019s anonymized mobile phone data comes from three major cities in Europe and South America. By examining the locations of calls, the networks of calls made, and the times of contact, the researchers found that most people have essentially three kinds of social networks in cities: social companions (who they are around a lot in the evenings and on weekends), work colleagues (who they tend to contact during weekdays), and more distant acquaintances with whom people have more sporadic contact.<\/span><\/p>\n

After distinguishing these networks from each other, the researchers were able to quantify the extent to which social activity was the primary cause of an urban trip; their conclusion falls within the bounds of previous, broader estimates, which have ascribed 15 to 30 percent of urban movement to social activity.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s pretty rare you would find these patterns showing up by themselves in multiple cities,\u201d Toole says. \u201cIt lends credence to the universality of this [pattern].\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In the paper, the researchers also build a model of urban social movement, which they call the \u201cGeoSim\u201d model; it extends previous models of urban mobility by adding a layer relating to social-activity choices. The model better fits the data in this study, and could be tested against future data sets as well.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cBig data is amazing,\u201d Toole says, \u201cbut this adds the context back into the social networks and movements.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The research was partly funded by the Accenture-MIT Alliance in Business Analytics, the Center for Complex Engineering Systems at MIT, and the National Science Foundation.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

MIT study details the degree to which urban movement is linked to social activity. CAMBRIDGE, Mass. —\u00a0If you live in a city, you know that a fair amount of your movement around town is social in nature. But how much, exactly? A new study co-authored by MIT researchers uses a new method to infer that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":2942,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-social-science"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/MIT-Urban-Sociability-02_0.jpg",639,426,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/MIT-Urban-Sociability-02_0-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/MIT-Urban-Sociability-02_0-300x200.jpg",300,200,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/MIT-Urban-Sociability-02_0.jpg",639,426,false],"large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/MIT-Urban-Sociability-02_0.jpg",639,426,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/MIT-Urban-Sociability-02_0.jpg",639,426,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/MIT-Urban-Sociability-02_0.jpg",639,426,false],"ultp_layout_landscape_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/MIT-Urban-Sociability-02_0.jpg",639,426,false],"ultp_layout_landscape":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/MIT-Urban-Sociability-02_0.jpg",639,426,false],"ultp_layout_portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/MIT-Urban-Sociability-02_0.jpg",600,400,false],"ultp_layout_square":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/MIT-Urban-Sociability-02_0.jpg",600,400,false],"newspaper-x-single-post":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/MIT-Urban-Sociability-02_0.jpg",639,426,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-big":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/MIT-Urban-Sociability-02_0.jpg",540,360,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-list-image":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/MIT-Urban-Sociability-02_0.jpg",95,63,false],"web-stories-poster-portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/MIT-Urban-Sociability-02_0.jpg",639,426,false],"web-stories-publisher-logo":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/MIT-Urban-Sociability-02_0.jpg",96,64,false],"web-stories-thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/MIT-Urban-Sociability-02_0.jpg",150,100,false]},"author_info":{"info":["Amrita Tuladhar"]},"category_info":"Social Science<\/a>","tag_info":"Social Science","comment_count":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2941"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2941\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2942"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}