The activity of the Data Science Laboratory comprises those research lines that regard digital traces of human behavior as first-order objects for scientific investigation. The laboratory has a strong interdisciplinary character, covering research on social media, on-line social networks, pervasive systems, wireless sensor networks, and applications to epidemiology. Methodologically, the laboratory extends the traditional toolbox of complex systems research with techniques from data mining, machine learning, and with the use of scalable computational infrastructures that can deal with large-scale records of activity from modern techno-social systems.
At present, the activity of the Data Science Laboratory focuses on two main research areas. The first research area deals with measuring dynamical networks of human mobility and proximity in a variety of real-world settings. The SocioPatterns project is the overarching effort that encompasses these activities: it is an international collaboration, led by the ISI Foundation, that brings together physicists, computer scientists, electrical engineers and designers under the single objective of designing and deploying scalable sensor networks that can be used to mine human contacts in hospitals, schools, conferences, and more. The SocioPatterns project leverages these data sources to inform research activities on human dynamics, opportunistic networks, organizational science, and data-driven epidemiology. Applications to ubiquitous social environments and art/science explorations are also part of the project.
The second research area, at the interface with computer science, deals with on-line systems that entangle human behavior and information networks, such as Twitter and other on-line social networking systems. The research is carried out in collaboration with the Informatics School of Indiana University and the Computer Science Department of the University of Torino.
Projects:
- SocioPatterns
- EveryAware
- StudioLab
- DataInterfaces
- Truthy