WELCOME

We increasingly use digital media and computational devices in our daily activities, and leave behind a sizable amount of digital traces while doing so. The proliferation of mobile devices, and the incorporation of various sensing technologies in these devices, will further add to this growing trail of data. The possibility to mine and analyze these data, and the scale at which this can be done on contemporary computer systems, affords a novel, data-driven approach in the investigation of various aspects of human behavior.

SocioPatterns is an interdisciplinary research collaboration that adopts this data-driven methodology with the aim of uncovering fundamental patterns in social dynamics and coordinated human activity.

To achieve its scientific goals, the SocioPatterns collaboration also contributes to the development of new technologies for collecting relevant data. In particular, the collaboration supports the development of the SocioPatterns sensing platform, which uses wireless wearable sensors to gather longitudinal data on human mobility and face-to-face proximity in real-world environments. The SocioPatterns team also works on developing tools and techniques to represent, analyze and visualize the collected data.

FEATURED: INFECTIOUS SOCIOPATTERNS POSTER

Composite image. Left: One of the sixty-nine daily diagrams of contact activity. Right: Thumbnail of the poster with the complete visualization and accompanying text.

Left: One of the sixty-nine daily diagrams of contact activity. Right: Thumbnail of the poster with the complete visualization and accompanying text.

We have created a visualization of sixty-nine days of face-to-face contact activity among more that 30,000 persons based on data collected during the INFECTIOUS: STAY AWAY exhibition in the Science Gallery in Dublin, Ireland. This visualization is published in our gallery as a poster that can be freely downloaded.

COLLABORATION MEMBERS

SocioPatterns is a collaboration between researchers and developers from the following institutions and companies:

ISI Foundation – Turin, Italy
CNRS – Centre de Physique Théorique – Marseille, France
ENS Lyon – Laboratoire de Physique – Lyon, France
Bitmanufaktur – Berlin, Germany

NEWS

New paper in BMC Infectious Diseases

We have just published a new paper in BMC Infectious Diseases. We use SocioPatterns data collected in a hospital ward to ask which representations of contact data work best to inform models of disease spread. We show that the commonly used contact matrix representation fails to reproduce the size of the epidemic obtained using the high-resolution contact data and also fails to identify the most at-risk classes. We introduce a contact matrix of probability distributions that takes into account the heterogeneity of contact durations between (and within) classes of individuals, and we show that, in the case study presented, this representation yields a good approximation of the epidemic spreading properties obtained by using the high-resolution data.

New research using SocioPatterns data

A new manuscript describing research done using SocioPatterns data collected in two jointly organized conferences is available here.

SocioPatterns featured in Scientific American Graphic Science column

Scientific American used our data to display contact networks in a hospital ward in the November 2012 Graphic Science column. The interactive visualization can be seen here.