Human mobility patterns are complex and distinct from one person to another. Nevertheless, motivated by tremendous potential benefits of modeling such patterns in enabling new mobile services and technologies, researchers have attempted to capture salient characteristics of human mobility. In this short survey paper, we review some of the major techniques for modeling humans’ co-location, as we...

In this paper we investigate non-dominant collective urban mobility patterns in user-generated mobile network traffic data using a visual analytics tool. Based on our previous approach and results, we herein focus on the next level of mobility detail: we visually dig deeper and disclose some nondominant, potentially hidden mobility patterns in four urban test areas in Northern Italy. The result...

Understanding human mobility patterns is of great importance for urban planning, traffic management, and even marketing campaign. However, the capability of capturing detailed human movements with fine-grained spatial and temporal granularity is still limited. In this study, we extracted high-resolution mobility data from a collection of over 1.3 billion geo-located Twitter messages. Regarding ...

In Pocket Switched Networks (PSN), the similarity of mobility patterns of different human beings can be exploited to design routing protocols that have better packet delivery ratio and shorter end-to-end delay. However, current research lacks techniques to effectively quantify the similarity of human beings’ mobility behaviors as they exhibit diversities in both the time and spatial domains. In...

Fundamental laws governing human mobility have many important applications such as forecasting and controlling epidemics or optimizing transportation systems. These mobility patterns, studied in the context of out of home activity during travel or social interactions with observations recorded from cell phone use or diffusion of money, suggest that in extra-personal space humans follow a high d...

The intrinsic factor that drives the human movement remains unclear for decades. While our observations from intra-urban and inter-urban trips both demonstrate a universal law in human mobility. Be specific, the probability from one location to another is inversely proportional to the number of population living in locations which are closer than the destination. A simple rank-based model is th...

Spatial mobility is a topical concept of analytical migration science, which makes it possible to assess the desires, readiness and capabilities of the population to move over certain distances and time. In the management of spatial mobility assessment requires the organization of systematic monitoring, which includes identifying the mobility potential in spatial and temporal interpretation, th...

We present a data model for tracking mobile objects and reporting the result of continuous queries. The model relies on a discrete view of the spatio-temporal space, where the 2D space and the time axis are respectively partitioned in a finite set of user-defined areas and in constant-size intervals. We define a query language to retrieve objects that match mobility patterns describing a sequen...

Location sharing services (LSS) like Foursquare, Gowalla, and Facebook Places support hundreds of millions of userdriven footprints (i.e., “checkins”). Those global-scale footprints provide a unique opportunity to study the social and temporal characteristics of how people use these services and to model patterns of human mobility, which are significant factors for the design of future mobile+l...