DMI Webinar "High-Resolution Proximity Networks: from Wearable Sensors to Contact Tracing Apps"

“High-Resolution Proximity Networks: from Wearable Sensors to Contact Tracing Apps”

17 February 2021, 12:30-13:30 CEST

ABSTRACT: 

Digital technologies provide the opportunity to quantify important human behaviors, and have revolutionized the way we think about human mobility and close-range proximity, enabling new research lines in computational social science, urban mobility, computational epidemiology and public health. In this talk I will review the experience of the SocioPatterns collaboration (www.sociopatterns.org), a decade-long international effort on studying high-resolution human proximity networks using wearable sensors. I will discuss technology requirements and data collection experiences in diverse environments such as schools, hospitals and households, including ongoing work in low-resource rural settings in Africa. I will discuss the complex features found in empirical temporal networks and show how methods from network science and machine learning can be used to model network structures and dynamical processes occurring over the network. I will close by discussing how high-resolution proximity data can inform the design of targeted mitigation strategies for epidemic processes, including app-based digital contact tracing.

SPEAKER: 

Prof. Ciro Cattuto, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department of the University of Torino (Torino, Italy) and a Principal Researcher and Research Area Coordinator at ISI Foundation (Torino, Italy). His interests include data science, public health, and the social impact of data. He holds a PhD in Physics from the University of Perugia, Italy and has carried out interdisciplinary research at the University of Michigan, USA, at the Enrico Fermi Center and Sapienza University in Rome, and at the Frontier Research System of RIKEN, Japan. He is a founder and principal investigator of the SocioPatterns collaboration, an international effort on studying social networks with wearable sensors, with applications to epidemiology. He is an editorial board member of Scientific Data, EPJ Data Science, PeerJ Computer Science, Journal of Computational Social Science, Data & Policy journals. He was an organizer and chair of leading conferences in Computer Science, Data Science, Network Science and Complex Systems. He is a Fellow of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) and a member of the Doctoral Council of the Data Science PhD program of Sapienza University of Roma. He is a Member of the Strategic Planning Committee of CRT Foundation. He was appointed as one of the experts in the Italian Government's Covid-19 data-driven task force. His research was featured in the national and international press.

The talks will be held online. If you would like to participate, please fill this form.

For more information, write to dmi@unibocconi.it.