In the coming months we will be inundated with political messaging from a host of sources. This is always what happens in the period leading up to a political election and this time it’s no different. Well…one thing is different actually: this time we can use new data visualizations from professor David Lazer’s lab to ...
Here’s a statistic for you: From internet and mobile phone use to credit card transactions and voting records, we now generate more socio-economic data each 1.2 years than we did during all of previous human history combined. That’s according to a McKinsey Global Institute Study cited in the first pages of the new open-access online ...
This morning I met with Alessandro Vespignani, one of the network science faculty members, to discuss the overarching themes of his research. I’m always totally inspired when I walk away from these conversations and it reminded me that I haven’t had a chance to post the video our wonderful multimedia team produced earlier in the ...
Since you’re reading this blog, you’ve probably heard of network science and big data by now. It’s the field of research in which scientists leverage the amazing amounts of data we have these days to understand the world’s myriad networks, be they social, genetic or even transportation-based (ie., the network of airline flights across the ...
I’ve written quite a bit about Network Science both here and for the News@Northeastern. And since learning the term less than a year ago, I’ve come to believe that it will be critical in the way we approach many scientific questions going forward. Nonetheless, it remains a somewhat elusive subject. Most people (including myself) initially ...
I’ve been on a space kick lately, ever since I got a telescope for my birthday and looked up close at the moon for the first time in my life. So the image on the left calls to my mind nebulae and distant galaxies…a sort of map of the universe, that infinitely large entity. But ...
I just met one of the coolest people at Northeastern. His name is Mauro Martino and he’s the man behind most of the data visualization coming out of the university’s various network science labs. After spending a couple years at the MIT media lab, he joined Albert-László Barabási’s Center for Complex Network Research and David ...
Okay readers, be prepared for a circuitous walk down Network Lane today. Last Thursday, one of Albert-László Barabási‘s post doctoral researchers, Yang Yu Liu, co-authored a News & Views article for Nature Physics. Together with MIT’s Jean-Jacques Slotine, Liu summarizes the impact of a research article published online that same day. The research was carried ...
May 24, 2012 UPDATE: It looks like our guys were right! Last night, Phillip Phillips was crowned the 2012 American Idol winner. According to the US twitter data, that’s exactly what Sternberg Distinguished Professor Alessandro Vespignani and his team over at Northeastern’s MoBS-lab predicted. This means a couple of things: 1) Apparently international voting isn’t ...
Here’s another Twitter-analysis post for all you network science junkies out there. And although I’m a bit late to the table (New Scientist reported on this a week ago) I couldn’t resist. Bruno Gonçalves, a postdoc in Alessandro Vespignani‘s research group here at Northeastern, and three colleagues at Indiana University expanded their research on partisan ...
I’m about halfway through physics professor Albert-Laszlo Barabasi’s book, Bursts. I’ll be writing about “bursty behavior” for the news at northeastern soon, but for today’s blog purposes suffice to say that humans behave in a “bursty” pattern instead of uniformly across time. For example, you probably don’t write an email once every twenty minutes all ...
Last week a coworker tried to explain the ins and outs of Twitter to me with little success. I get the point, really I do — it’s just that I find the information overload issue impossible to circumnavigate. “You just have to ignore some of it,” she said. This idea of a finite attention span ...