Alessandro Vespignani

Northeastern University | NEU

In recent years the research community has accumulated overwhelming evidence for the emergence of complex and heterogeneous connectivity patterns in a wide range of biological and socio-technical systems. The complex properties of real world networks have a profound impact on the behavior of equilibrium and non-equilibrium phenomena occurring in va...

The vast majority of strategies aimed at controlling contagion processes on networks consider the connectivity pattern of the system either quenched or annealed. However, in the real world, many networks are highly dynamical and evolve, in time, concurrently to the contagion process. Here, we derive an analytical framework for the study of control...

Large networked systems are constantly exposed to local damages and failures that can alter their functionality. The knowledge of the structure of these systems is however often derived through sampling strategies whose effectiveness at damage detection has not been thoroughly investigated so far. Here we study the performance of shortest path samp...

The recent work on the modified H5N1 has stirred an intense debate on the risk associated with the accidental release from biosafety laboratory of potential pandemic pathogens. Here, we assess the risk that the accidental escape of a novel transmissible influenza strain would not be contained in the local community. We develop here a detailed agent...

Interactions among multiple infectious agents are increasingly recognized as a fundamental issue in the understanding of key questions in public health regarding pathogen emergence, maintenance, and evolution. The full description of host-multipathogen systems is, however, challenged by the multiplicity of factors affecting the interaction dynamics...

The threat of bioterrorism and the possibility of accidental release have spawned a growth of interest in modeling the course of the release of a highly pathogenic agent. Studies focused on strategies to contain local outbreaks after their detection show that timely interventions with vaccination and contact tracing are able to halt transmission. H...

Large scale analysis and statistics of socio-technical systems that just a few short years ago would have required the use of consistent economic and human resources can nowadays be conveniently performed by mining the enormous amount of digital data produced by human activities. Although a characterization of several aspects of our societies is em...

We analyze the entire publication database of the American Physical Society generating longitudinal (50 years) citation networks geolocalized at the level of single urban areas. We define the knowledge diffusion proxy, and scientific production ranking algorithms to capture the spatio-temporal dynamics of Physics knowledge worldwide. By using the k...

In recent years the increasing availability of computer power and informatics tools has enabled the gathering of reliable data quantifying the complexity of socio-technical systems. Data-driven computational models have emerged as appropriate tools to tackle the study of contagion and diffusion processes as diverse as epidemic outbreaks, informatio...

Although the study of scientific and citation networks is well developed, the way in which ideas and concepts flow between scientific groups scattered around the world is still an open problem. We take a first step in this direction by using the citation patterns over the course of decades to shed light on how areas and fields in the general area o...

Microblogging platforms have now become major open source indicators for complex social interactions. With the advent of smartphones, the everincreasing mobile Internet traffic gives us the unprecedented opportunity to complement studies of complex social phenomena with real-time location information. In this work, we show that the data nowadays ac...

The random walk process lies underneath the description of a large number or real world phenomena. Here we provide a general framework for the study of random walk processes in time varying networks in the regime of time-scale mixing; i.e. when the network connectivity pattern and the random walk process dynamics are unfolding on the same time scal...

In most social, information, and collaboration systems the complex activity of agents generates rapidly evolving time-varying networks. Temporal changes in the network structure and the dynamical processes occurring on its fabric are usually coupled in ways that still challenge our mathematical or computational modelling. Here we analyse a mobile c...

Background Mathematical and computational models for infectious diseases are increasingly used to support public-health decisions; however, their reliability is currently under debate. Real-time forecasts of epidemic spread using data-driven models have been hindered by the technical challenges posed by parameter estimation and validation. Data gat...

The random walk process underlies the description of a large number of real-world phenomena. Here we provide the study of random walk processes in time-varying networks in the regime of time-scale mixing, i.e., when the network connectivity pattern and the random walk process dynamics are unfolding on the same time scale. We consider a model for ti...

The availability of large data sets have allowed researchers to uncover complex properties such as large scale fluctuations and heterogeneities in many networks which have lead to the breakdown of standard theoretical frameworks and models. Until recently these systems were considered as haphazard sets of points and connections. Recent advances hav...

Social contact patterns among individuals encode the transmission route of infectious diseases and are a key ingredient in the realistic characterization and modeling of epidemics. Unfortunately, the gathering of high quality experimental data on contact patterns in human populations is a very difficult task even at the coarse level of mixing patte...

Mobile, social, real-time: the ongoing revolution in the way people communicate has given rise to a new kind of epidemiology. Digital data sources, when harnessed appropriately, can provide local and timely information about disease and health dynamics in populations around the world. The rapid, unprecedented increase in the availability of relevan...

Supplementary information

We present a contribution to the debate on the predictability of social events using big data analytics. We focus on the elimination of contestants in the American Idol TV shows as an example of a well defined electoral phenomenon that each week draws millions of votes in the USA. We provide evidence that Twitter activity during the time span defin...

The wide adoption of social media has increased the competition among ideas for our finite attention. We employ a parsimonious agent-based model to study whether such a competition may affect the popularity of different memes, the diversity of information we are exposed to, and the fading of our collective interests for specific topics. Agents shar...

Network modeling plays a critical role in identifying statistical regularities and structural principles common to many systems. The large majority of recent modeling approaches are connectivity driven. The structural patterns of the network are at the basis of the mechanisms ruling the network formation. Connectivity driven models necessarily prov...

Record labels would like to identify potential artists as early as possible in their career, before other companies approach the artists with competing contracts. However, there is a huge number of new artists, and the process of identifying the ones ...

Network science has undergone explosive growth in the last ten years. This growth has been driven by the recent availability of huge digital databases, which has facilitated the analysis and construction of large-scale networks from real data and the identification of statistical regularities and structural principles common to many systems. Networ...

The Dynamically Driven Renormalization Group is a general framework developed to study the critical properties of nonequilibrium systems with stationary states. In particular this renormalization scheme allows the systematic analysis of several models showing self-organized criticality in terms of usual concepts of phase transitions and critical ph...

In this paper we develop a framework to analyze the behavior of contagion and spreading processes in complex subpopulation networks where individuals have memory of their subpopulation of origin. We introduce a metapopulation model in which subpopulations are connected through heterogeneous fluxes of individuals. The mobility process among communit...

In order to understand better the morphology and the asymptotic behavior in Diffusion Limited Aggregation (DLA), we studied a large numbers of very large off-lattice circular clusters. We inspected both dynamical and geometric asymptotic properties, namely the moments of the particle's sticking distances and the scaling behavior of the transverse g...

In recent years the increasing availability of computer power and informatics tools has enabled the gathering of reliable data quantifying the complexity of socio-technical systems. Data-driven computational models have emerged as appropriate tools to tackle the study of dynamical phenomena as diverse as epidemic outbreaks, information spreading an...

Relaxation processes taking place after microfracturing of laboratory samples give rise to ultrasonic acoustic emission signals. Statistical analysis of the resulting time series has revealed many features which are characteristic of critical phenomena. In particular, the autocorrelation functions obey a power-law behavior, implying a power spectru...

Current modeling of infectious diseases allows for the study of realistic scenarios that include population heterogeneity, social structures, and mobility processes down to the individual level. The advances in the realism of epidemic description call for the explicit modeling of individual behavioral responses to the presence of disease within mod...

Microblogging and mobile devices appear to augment human social capabilities, which raises the question whether they remove cognitive or biological constraints on human communication. In this paper we analyze a dataset of Twitter conversations collected across six months involving 1.7 million individuals and test the theoretical cognitive limit on...

The last decade saw the advent of increasingly realistic epidemic models that leverage on the availability of highly detailed census and human mobility data. Data-driven models aim at a granularity down to the level of households or single individuals. However, relatively little systematic work has been done to provide coupled behavior-disease mode...

In this paper we present an experimental framework to gather data on face-to-face social interactions between individuals, with a high spatial and temporal resolution. We use active Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) devices that assess contacts with one another by exchanging low-power radio packets. When individuals wear the beacons as a badge,...

Human mobility and activity patterns mediate contagion on many levels, including: spatial spread of infectious diseases, diffusion of rumors, and emergence of consensus. These patterns however are often dominated by specific locations and recurrent flows and poorly modeled by the random diffusive dynamics generally used to study them. Here we devel...

Many projects have tried to analyze the structure and dynamics of application overlay networks on the Internet using packet analysis and network flow data. While such analysis is essential for a variety of network management and security tasks, it is infeasible on many networks: either the volume of data is so large as to make packet inspection int...

The global public health community has closely monitored the unfolding of the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic to best mitigate its impact on society. However, little attention has been given to the impact of this response on the environment. Antivirals and antibiotics prescribed to treat influenza are excreted into wastewater in a biologically active...

Computational models play an increasingly important role in the assessment and control of public health crises, as demonstrated during the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic. Much research has been done in recent years in the development of sophisticated data-driven models for realistic computer-based simulations of infectious disease spreading. However,...

After the emergence of the H1N1 influenza in 2009, some countries responded with travel-related controls during the early stage of the outbreak in an attempt to contain or slow down its international spread. These controls along with self-imposed travel limitations contributed to a decline of about 40% in international air traffic to/from Mexico fo...

Online popularity has enormous impact on opinions, culture, policy, and profits. We provide a quantitative, large scale, temporal analysis of the dynamics of online content popularity in two massive model systems, the Wikipedia and an entire country's Web space. We find that the dynamics of popularity are characterized by bursts, displaying charact...

Online popularity has enormous impact on opinions, culture, policy, and profits, especially with the advent of the social Web and Web advertising. Yet the processes that drive popularity in our online world have only begun to be explored. We provide a quantitative, large scale, longitudinal analysis of the dynamics of online content popularity in t...

Here we present the Global Epidemic and Mobility (GLEaM) model that integrates sociodemographic and population mobility data in a spatially structured stochastic disease approach to simulate the spread of epidemics at the worldwide scale. We discuss the flexible structure of the model that is open to the inclusion of different disease structures an...

Digital networks, mobile devices, and the possibility of mining the ever-increasing amount of digital traces that we leave behind in our daily activities are changing the way we can approach the study of human and social interactions. Large-scale datasets, however, are mostly available for collective and statistical behaviors, at coarse granulariti...

The Turing mechanism provides a paradigm for the spontaneous generation of patterns in reaction-diffusion systems. A framework that describes Turing-pattern formation in the context of complex networks should provide a new basis for studying the phenomenon.

In recent years large-scale computational models for the realistic simulation of epidemic outbreaks have been used with increased frequency. Methodologies adapt to the scale of interest and range from very detailed agent-based models to spatially-structured metapopulation models. One major issue thus concerns to what extent the geotemporal spreadin...

Structured metapopulation models constitute one of the main approaches to the modeling of epidemic spread. While the contagion dynamics in each subpopulation is realized in a coarse-grained scheme, these models rely on the integration of multi-layered mobility data and accurate representations of human movements in different scales. Different scale...

We study the patterns of the communities of workers and students in the italian insular regions, by applying grouping methodologies based on the characterization of the commuter's movements as a complex weighted network. In order the get the community structure we apply an algorithm based on the maximization of the weighted modularity that allows u...

Human mobility and interactions represent key ingredients in the spreading dynamics of an infectious disease. The flows of traveling people form a network characterized by complex features, such as strong topological and traffic heterogeneities, that unfolds at different temporal and spatial scales, from short ranges to the global scale. Computatio...

The unfolding of pandemic influenza A(H1N1) for Fall 2009 in the Northern Hemisphere is still uncertain. Plans for vaccination campaigns and vaccine trials are underway, with the first batches expected to be available early October. Several studies point to the possibility of an anticipated pandemic peak that could undermine the effectiveness of va...

The Black Death was one of the most devastating pandemics in history. Beginning in 1347, the plague took just three years to spread from Constantinople in western Turkey to Italy and then on to the rest of Europe, leaving nearly a quarter of the continent's population dead in its wake. Historical studies confirm that the disease diffused smoothly,...

While the H1N1 pandemic is reaching high levels of influenza activity in the Northern Hemisphere, the attention focuses on the ability of national health systems to respond to the expected massive influx of additional patients. Given the limited capacity of health care providers and hospitals and the limited supplies of antibiotics, it is important...

Among the realistic ingredients to be considered in the computational modeling of infectious diseases, human mobility represents a crucial challenge both on the theoretical side and in view of the limited availability of empirical data. To study the interplay between short-scale commuting flows and long-range airline traffic in shaping the spatiote...

Determining the number of cases in an epidemic is fundamental to properly evaluate several disease features of high relevance for public health policies such as mortality, morbidity or hospitalization rates. Surveillance efforts are however incomplete especially at the early stage of an outbreak due to the ongoing learning process about the disease...

Recently, the abundance of digital data is enabling the implementation of graph-based ranking algorithms that provide system level analysis for ranking publications and authors. Here, we take advantage of the entire Physical Review publication archive (1893-2006) to construct authors' networks where weighted edges, as measured from opportunely norm...

Background: On 11 June the World Health Organization officially raised the phase of pandemic alert (with regard to the new H1N1 influenza strain) to level 6. As of 19 July, 137,232 cases of the H1N1 influenza strain have been officially confirmed in 142 different countries, and the pandemic unfolding in the Southern hemisphere is now under scrutin...

We live in an increasingly interconnected world of techno-social systems, in which infrastructures composed of different technological layers are interoperating within the social component that drives their use and development. Examples are provided by the Internet, the World Wide Web, WiFi communication technologies, and transportation and mobilit...

A large number of complex systems find a natural abstraction in the form of weighted networks whose nodes represent the elements of the system and the weighted edges identify the presence of an interaction and its relative strength. In recent years, the study of an increasing number of large-scale networks has highlighted the statistical heterogene...

In densely populated urban areas WiFi routers form a tightly interconnected proximity network that can be exploited as a substrate for the spreading of malware able to launch massive fraudulent attacks. In this article, we consider several scenarios for the deployment of malware that spreads over the wireless channel of major urban areas in the US....

The correct description of reaction-diffusion phenomena requires a detailed knowledge of the contact networks defining the interactions between individuals and groups of individuals. For this reason, the study of reaction-diffusion processes has been recently widened with opportune models and methods dealing with the heterogeneity and large scale f...

In spite of the Internet's phenomenal growth and social impact, many aspects of the collective communication behavior of its users are largely unknown. Understanding the structure and dynamics of the behavioral networks that connect users with each other and with services across the Internet is key to modeling the network and designing future appli...

The spatial structure of populations is a key element in the understanding of the large-scale spreading of epidemics. Motivated by the recent empirical evidence on the heterogeneous properties of transportation and commuting patterns among urban areas, we present a thorough analysis of the behavior of infectious diseases in metapopulation models ch...

According to Pruessner and Peters [G. Pruessner and O. Peters, Phys. Rev. E 73, 025106(R) (2006)], the finite-size scaling exponents of the order parameter in sandpile models depend on the tuning of driving and dissipation rates with system size. We point out that the same is not true for avalanches in the slow driving limit.

By simulating two-dimensional models of electric breakdown and fracture it is possible to characterize the rupture of disordered materials subject to an increasing external stress. We provide a review of numerical and analytical results concerning the scaling properties of avalanche events prior the macroscopic breakdown of the material. The obtain...

The availability of large data sets has allowed researchers to uncover complex properties such as large-scale fluctuations and heterogeneities in many networks, leading to the breakdown of standard theoretical frameworks and models. Until recently these systems were considered as haphazard sets of points and connections. Recent advances have genera...

This paper provides a survey on studies that analyze the macroeconomic effects of intellectual property rights (IPR). The first part of this paper introduces different patent policy instruments and reviews their effects on R&D and economic growth. This part also discusses the distortionary effects and distributional consequences of IPR protection a...

We study the dynamics of epidemic and reaction-diffusion processes in metapopulation models with heterogeneous connectivity patterns. In susceptible-infected-removed-like processes, along with the standard local epidemic threshold, the system exhibits a global invasion threshold. We provide an explicit expression of the threshold that sets a critic...

We study the structure of the network representing the interurban commuting traffic of the Sardinia region, Italy, which amounts to 375 municipalities and 1 600 000 inhabitants. We use a weighted network representation in which vertices correspond to towns and the edges correspond to the actual commuting flows among those towns. We characterize qua...

Preface; List of abbreviations; 1. A brief history of the Internet; 2. How the Internet works; 3. Measuring the global Internet; 4. The Internet's large-scale topology; 5. Modeling the Internet; 6. Internet robustness; 7. Virtual and social networks in the Internet; 8. Searching and walking on the Internet; 9. Epidemics in the Internet; 10. Beyond...

The understanding of the immense and intricate topological structure of the World Wide Web (WWW) is a major scientific and technological challenge. This has been recently tackled by characterizing the properties of its representative graphs, in which vertices and directed edges are identified with Web pages and hyperlinks, respectively. Data gather...