We have published a new paper in PLoS ONE describing the contact patterns among students in a French high school in two different years.

The aggregated contact networks and contact matrices show a clear structure, with much larger values on the diagonal (corresponding to contacts within each class). In addition, we perform a longitudinal analysis of the data on two very different timescales and we show the high stability of the contact patterns across days and across years: the statistical distributions of numbers and durations of contacts are the same in different periods, and we observe a very high similarity of the contact matrices measured in different days or different years. We investigate the stability of contact networks in more details through the similarity of neighbourhoods of single individuals in different days, showing that the contacts of each individual vary substantially in different days, but much less than in null models in which contacts are renewed at random from one day to the next. The observed values of these similarities are similar in the two data sets corresponding to two different years, and can thus be considered as a feature to be included in realistic models of human contacts in such an environment.

We moreover release the corresponding time-resolved datasets. The datasets are available here as a tab-separated list of contacts during 20-second intervals of the data collection.

As each year, SocioPatterns members have presented new results at the NetSci conference (this year in Berkeley).
Ciro Cattuto was invited speaker in the workshop Temporal Networks, Human Dynamics and Social Physics, with a presentation titled “Learning structures from high-resolution social network data”.
Laetitia Gauvin presented results on “Selective Latent Factor Analysis for Epidemic Spreading in Time-Varying Networks” in the main conference.

We have just published a new paper in PLoS ONE, titled “Estimating Potential Infection Transmission Routes in Hospital Wards Using Wearable Proximity Sensors”. This paper describes the properties of the contact patterns between patients, patients and health-care workers (HCWs) and among HCWs in a hospital ward in Lyon, France, from Monday, December 6, 2010 at 1:00 pm to Friday, December 10, 2010 at 2:00 pm. The study included 46 HCWs and 29 patients.

In addition, we release the corresponding time-resolved dataset. The dataset is available here as a tab-separated list of contacts during 20-second intervals of the data collection, and also in gexf format as a supplementary information to the published paper.

Today we release a new manuscript based on the PhD work of Juliette Stehlé and the behavioral data we collected in a primary school using the SocioPatterns proximity sensors. The manuscript, Gender homophily from spatial behavior in a primary school: a sociometric study , uses high-resolution proximity data among children to investigate gender homophily, its evolution with children age, and its dependence on tie strength.

We have released a new preprint dealing with the analysis of temporal networks of human contacts: “Activity clocks: spreading dynamics on temporal networks of human contact“. In this manuscript, we show how spreading processes are an efficient investigation tool of contact networks by focusing on the arrival time distributions of such processes. When computed in terms of “activity clocks” inherent to each node of the network, these distributions are shown to exhibit a very robust behavior. We define hierarchies of null and generative models of time-varying networks and  show that the empirical patterns can be understood in terms of heterogeneous inter-event time distributions coupled with heterogeneous numbers of events per edge. We also show, both empirically and by using a synthetic dataset, that significant deviations from the generic  behavior can be caused by the presence of edge classes with strong activity correlations.