Web: http://socialphysics.media.mit.edu/

These are the questions of social physics, and they are especially important right now, because of global competition, environmental challenges, and government failure.

The engine that drives social physics is big data: the newly ubiquitous digital data that is becoming available about all aspects of human life. By using these data to build a predictive, computational theory of human behavior we can hope to engineer better social systems.

Papers

The Strength of the Strongest Ties in Collaborative Problem Solving
de Montjoye, Y. A., Stopczynski, A., Shmueli, E., Pentland, A., & Lehmann, S. (2014). The Strength of the Strongest Ties in Collaborative Problem Solving. Nature srep, 4.

openPDS: Protecting the Privacy of Metadata through SafeAnswers
de Montjoye Y-A, Shmueli E, Wang SS, Pentland AS (2014) openPDS: Protecting the Privacy of Metadata through SafeAnswers. PLoS ONE 9(7): e98790. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0098790

Augmented Betweenness Centrality for Environmentally-Aware Traffic Monitoring in Transportation Networks
Puzis, Rami, Yaniv Altshuler, Yuval Elovici, Shlomo Bekhor, Yoram Shiftan, and Alex (Sandy) Pentland.  Journal of Intelligent Transportation Systems 17, no. 1 (2013): 91-105.

Classifying Spending Behavior using Socio-Mobile Data
VK Singh, L Freeman, B Lepri, AS Pentland, HUMAN 2 (2), pp. 99-111, 2013

Detecting Anomalous Behaviors Using Structural Properties of Social Networks
Y. Altshuler, M. Fire, E. Shmueli, Y. Elovici, A. Bruckstein, A. Pentland and D. Lazer, SBP 2013

Efficient detection of contagious outbreaks in massive metropolitan encounter networks
Lijun Sun, Kay W. Axhausen, Der-Horng Lee, Manuel Cebrian, CoRR abs/1401.2815 (2014)

Friends don’t Lie – Inferring Personality Traits from Social Network Structure
Jacopo Staiano, Bruno Lepri, Nadav Aharony, Fabio Pianesi, Nicu Sebe, Alex Pentland, ACM UBICOMP 2012.

Global Manhunt Pushes the Limits of Social Mobilization
I. Rahwan, S. Dsouza, A. Rutherford, V. Naroditskiy, J. McInerney, M. Venanzi, N. R. Jennings, M. Cebrian

Going Beyond Traits: Multimodal Classification Of Personality States In The Wild
Kyriaki Kalimeri, Bruno Lepri, Fabio Pianesi

How Many Makes a Crowd? On the Evolution of Learning as a Factor of Community Coverage
Yaniv Altshuler, Michael Fire, Nadav Aharony, Yuval Elovici, and Alex (“Sandy”) Pentland

Incremental Learning with Accuracy Prediction of Social and Individual Properties from Mobile-Phone Data
Yaniv Altshuler, Nadav Aharony, Michael Fire, Yuval Elovici, Alex ”Sandy” Pentland

Inducing Peer Pressure to Promote Cooperation
A. Mani, I. Rahwan, and A. Pentland

Iterated crowdsourcing dilemma game
Koji Oishi, Manuel Cebrian, Andres Abeliuk, Naoki Masuda

Limits of social mobilization
A. Rutherford, M. Cebrian , S. Dsouza, E. Moro, A. Pentland, and I. Rahwan

Modeling the Co-evolution of Behaviors and Social Relationships Using Mobile Phone Data
Wen Dong, Bruno Lepri, and Alex (Sandy) Pentland

Modeling Functional Roles Dynamics in Small Group Interactions
Wen Dong, Bruno Lepri, Fabio Pianesi, and Alex Pentland

On the Rationality and Optimality of Transportation Networks Defense—a Network Centrality Approach
Yaniv Altshuler, Rami Puzis, Yuval Elovici, Shlomo Bekhor, and Alex (Sandy) Pentland

The Social Amplifier – Reaction of Human Communities to Emergencies
Yaniv Altshuler,
Michael Fire, Erez Shmueli
Yuval Elovici,
Alfred Bruckstein,  Alex (Sandy) Pentland, David Lazer

Targeted Social Mobilization in a Global Manhunt
A. Rutherford, M. Cebrian, I. Rahwan, S. Dsouza, J. McInerney, V. Naroditskiy, M. Venanzi, N. R. Jennings, J.R. deLara, E. Wahlstedt, S.U. Miller

Time-Critical Social Mobilization
G. Pickard, W. Pan, I. Rahwan, M. Cebrian, R. Crane, A. Madan, A. Pentland

Temporal Dynamics of Scale-Free Networks
Erez Shmueli, Yaniv Altshuler, and Alex ”Sandy” Pentland

Trade-offs in Social and Behavioral Modeling in Mobile Networks
Yaniv Altshuler1, Michael Fire2, Nadav Aharony1, Zee Volkovich3, Yuval Elovici2  and Alex (Sandy) Pentland1

Detecting Anomalous Behaviors Using Structural Properties of Social Networks
Yaniv Altshuler1, Michael Fire2, Erez Shmueli1, Yuval Elovici2, Alfred Bruckstein3, Alex (Sandy) Pentland1, and David Lazer4

Trends Prediction Using Social Diffusion Models
Yaniv Altshuler, Wei Pan, and Alex (Sandy) Pentland

Verification in Referral-Based Crowdsourcing
V. Naroditskiy, I. Rahwan, M. Cebrian, N. R. Jennings

Analytical reasoning task reveals limits of social learning in networks
I. Rahwan, D. Krasnoshtan, A. Shariff, J. F. Bonnefon (2014).
Journal of the Royal Society Interface. 11(93).

Classifying Spending Behavior using Socio-Mobile Data
Singh, Vivek K., Laura Freeman, Bruno Lepri, and Alex Sandy Pentland
HUMAN 2, no. 2 (2013): pp-99.

Situation fencing: making geo-fencing personal and dynamic
Pongpaichet, Siripen, Vivek K. Singh, Ramesh Jain, and Alex Sandy Pentland.
In Proceedings of the 1st ACM international workshop on Personal data meets distributed multimedia, pp. 3-10. ACM, 2013.

Sensing, Understanding, and Shaping Social Behavior
E. Shmueli, V.K. Singh, B. Lepri, and A. Pentland
IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems, 2014 (to appear)

Efficient detection of contagious outbreaks in massive metropolitan encounter networks.
Sun, L., K. W. Axhausen, D.-H. Lee and M. Cebrian (2014)
arXiv preprint arXiv:1401.2815.

Understanding metropolitan patterns of daily encounters
Sun, L., K. W. Axhausen, D. H. Lee and X. Huang (2013).
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 110(34): 13774-13779.

Measuring large-scale social networks with high resolution
Stopczynski A, Sekara V, Sapiezynski P, Cuttone A, Madsen MM, et al. (2014) Measuring Large-Scale Social Networks with High Resolution. PLoS ONE 9(4): e95978. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0095978