Understanding human mobility from a microscopic point of view may represent a fundamental breakthrough for the development of a statistical physics for cognitive systems and it can shed light on the applicability of macroscopic statistical laws for social systems. Even if the complexity of individual behaviors prevents a true microscopic approach, the introduction of mesoscopic models allows th...

As the sharing economy has been increasing dramatically in the world, the mobile-hailed ridesharing companies like Uber and Lyft in the US, Didi Chuxing in China has begun to challenge traditional public transportation providers such as bus, subway or taxis. Ridesharing companies have shown their ability to provide the mobility services where public transit has failed. The human mobility demand...

Increasing frequency of extreme winter storms has resulted in costly damages and a disruptive impact on the northeastern United States. It is important to understand human mobility patterns during such storms for disaster preparation and relief operations. We investigated the effects of severe winter storms on human mobility during a 2015 blizzard using 2.69 million Twitter geolocations. We fou...

The deployment of ubiquitous computing technologies in the real-world has enabled the capture of large-scale quantitative data related to human behavior, including geographical information. This type of data creates an opportunity to characterize human mobility, with potential applications ranging from modeling the spread of viruses to transportation planning. This paper presents an initial stu...

In this paper we present a visual analytics approach for deriving spatio-temporal patterns of collective human mobility from a vast mobile network traffic data set. More than 88 million movements between pairs of radio cells—so-called handovers—served as a proxy for more than two months of mobility within four urban test areas in Northern Italy. In contrast to previous work, our approach relies...

The context in which a moving object moves contributes to the movement pattern observed. Likewise, the movement pattern reflects the properties of the movement context. In particular, big events influence human mobility depending on the dynamics of the events. However, this influence has not been explored to understand big events. In this paper, we propose a methodology for learning about big e...

In the advent of a pervasive presence of location sharing services researchers gained an unprecedented access to the direct records of human activity in space and time. This paper analyses geo-located Twitter messages in order to uncover global patterns of human mobility. Based on a dataset of almost a billion tweets recorded in 2012 we estimate volumes of international travelers in respect to ...

The study of human mobility patterns is important for both understanding human behaviour, a social phenomenon and to simulate infection transmission. Factors such as geometry representation, granularity, missing data and data noise affect the reliability, validity, and credibility of human mobility data, and any models drawn from this data. This thesis discusses the impact of spatial representa...