Chih-Chao (Jason) Chen: "Community Computing: Comparisons between Rural and Urban Societies using Mobile Phone Data"

This is one of the presentations given in the course Social Media Analysis 10-802 in Spring 2010.

Citation

N. Eagle, Y. de Montjoye, and L. Bettencourt (2009), "Community Computing: Comparisons between Rural and Urban Societies using Mobile Phone Data", IEEE Social Computing, 144-150.

Online version

This is the link of this paper. [1]

Quick Summary

In this paper, the author present a comparative analysis of the behavioral dynamics of rural and urban societies using four years of mobile phone data from all 1.4M subscribers within a small country. The main ideas are:

• Understanding of the social interactions becomes science rather than arts.
• Comparative analysis of the behavioral dynamics of rural and urban societies.
• Utilizing mobile call data records of 1.4M mobile phone subscribers over 4 years.

Main Results

• Quantify more fundamental rules of human.
• Confirm the hypothesis for behavioral adaptation, demonstrating that individuals change their patterns of communication to increase the similarity with their new social environment.

Comments

• Causality: more rigorous experiments should be designed and performed to establish causal relationships from urban environments.
• It is worthwhile to study in greater temporal detail the migration through these periods of change with their point of origin and the formation of new ones in their destination.