network branching, netsci08

I'm really torn by the number of great talks on today. There are three

parallel sessions, and for each time slot I want to be in at least two

places at once. I'm going to try to pick out talks that have some

relation to online social networks, community detection and scientific

networks, but some of the talks on the theory of clustering are

conflicting directly with some use cases of looking at some online

social networks. Ahh, what a dilemma.

The opening talk of this session was from Stwphen Uzzo talking about the

The next talk was by M.C Gonzales looking at the network of travel

patterns. This was the paper that made the cover of Nature.

The big question is trying to find out what the travel patterns of

people are. Thhe big problem is that getting data is apparently quite

hard.

The solution is to follow mobile phone signals, following 10^5 people over

10^6 locations over six months.

I'm looking at the movie of their data, and it is clear that many people

don't move very much, and other people move a lot. Of course one wants

to know some information about the people to see what effect like age,

wealth and occupation will have on these results. Again I'm looking for

something surprising.

There is a nice graph showing corellation over time, it is hugly spiked

on 24 hours. Not surprising, but a good reality check on the data.

I'm going to head to one of the other sessions after this talk.

This talk, though, is very nice. Once again there is evedence that our

behaviour is depressingly regular. Also the longer a journey the more likely

that a journey is going to be linear.

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