Ronaldo Menezes

• PhD
• Professor of Data and Network Science at University of Exeter

Ambient air pollution remains a global challenge, with adverse impacts on health and the environment. Addressing air pollution requires reliable data on pollutant concentrations, which form the foundation for interventions aimed at improving air quality. However, in many regions, including the United Kingdom, air pollution monitoring networks are c...

The participation of women in academia has increased in the last few decades across many fields (e.g., Computer Science, History, Medicine). However, this increase in the participation of women has not been the same at all career stages. Here, we study how gender participation within different fields is related to gender representation in top-ranki...

The modelling of human mobility is vital for the understanding of the complexity of urban dynamics and guiding effective interventions to improve quality of life. Traditional modelling approaches focus on `average citizens,' which overlook the multitude of experiences from distinct sociodemographic groups. Recent studies have unveiled significant v...

Human travelling behaviours are markedly regular, to a large extent predictable, and mostly driven by biological necessities and social constructs. Not surprisingly, such predictability is influenced by an array of factors ranging in scale from individual preferences and choices, through social groups and households, all the way to the global scale...

In recent years, there has been a significant increase in the detection of child sexual exploitation material (CSEM), with perpetrators increasingly turning to advanced encryption technologies to conceal their activities. This study delves into data from a Brazilian Federal Police operation on the Tor network, aimed at disrupting these illicit acti...

With trends of urbanisation on the rise, providing adequate housing to individuals remains a complex issue to be addressed. Often, the slow output of relevant housing policies, coupled with quickly increasing housing costs, leaves individuals with the burden of finding housing that is affordable and in a safe location. In this paper, we unveil how...

In recent years, the world has become increasingly concerned about air pollution. Particularly, High-Income Countries (HIC) and Upper Middle-Income Countries (UMIC) are implementing systems to monitor air pollution on a large scale to aid decision-making. Such efforts are essential, but they have at least three shortcomings: (1) they are costly; (2...

Segregation is a highly nuanced concept that researchers have worked to define and measure over the past several decades. Conventional approaches tend to estimate segregation based on residential patterns. However, the residential dimension does not fully comprise individuals’ interactions with their environment and, consequently, can misrepresent...

Co-authorship networks, where nodes represent authors and edges represent co-authorship relations, are key to understanding the production and diffusion of knowledge in academia. Social constructs, biases (implicit and explicit), and constraints (e.g. spatial, temporal) affect who works with whom and cause co-authorship networks to organise into ti...

Human travelling behaviours are markedly regular, to a large extent, predictable, and mostly driven by biological necessities (e.g. sleeping, eating) and social constructs (e.g. school schedules, synchronisation of labour). Not surprisingly, such predictability is influenced by an array of factors ranging in scale from individual (e.g. preference,...

Introduction & Background Public transportation is one of many factors that influence the level of disadvantage in a city. By facilitating movement within urban areas, transit systems can democratise accessibility to resources, while also fostering social integration among individuals from different areas and sociodemographic backgrounds. Conversel...

Socio-economic constructs and urban topology are crucial drivers of human mobility patterns. During the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, these patterns were reshaped in their components: the spatial dimension represented by the daily travelled distance, and the temporal dimension expressed as the synchronization time of commuting routines. Here,...

With trends of urbanisation on the rise, providing adequate housing to individuals remains a complex issue to be addressed. Often, the slow output of relevant housing policies, coupled with quickly increasing housing costs, leaves individuals with the burden of finding housing that is affordable and safe. In this paper, we unveil how urban planning...

Cities create potential for individuals from different backgrounds to interact with one another. It is often the case, however, that urban infrastructure obfuscates this potential, creating dense pockets of affluence and poverty throughout a region. The spatial distribution of job opportunities, and how it intersects with the residential landscape,...

Segregation is a highly nuanced concept that researchers have worked to define and measure over the past several decades. Conventional approaches tend to estimate segregation based on residential patterns in a static manner. In this work, we analyse socioeconomic inequalities, assessing segregation in various dimensions of the urban experience. Mor...

Cities create potential for individuals from different backgrounds to interact with one another. It is often the case, however, that urban infrastructure obfuscates this potential, creating dense pockets of affluence and poverty throughout a region. The spatial distribution of job opportunities, and how it intersects with the residential landscape,...

Livestock production is one of the world’s most important economic activities, involving nearly every country either as a producer or consumer. Indeed, around 1.3 billion people worldwide depend on livestock production. As livestock numbers increase due to the growth in the world population, so does the need for modelling and understanding the patt...

Academia is a competitive world where researchers are judged by their productivity, and their strategies to get visibility and success (i.e., number of citations) vary. In addition to conducting rigorous research, there are social strategies that influence authors’ and their papers’ level of citations. The author’s position in the co-authorship net...

pSTEM fields (Physical Sciences, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) are known for showing a gender imbalance favouring men. This imbalance can be seen at several levels, including in university and industry, where men are the majority of the posts. Academic success is partly dependent on the value of the researchers’ co-authorship networks. O...

Cattle movement is an intrinsic part of animal husbandry (i.e., breeding, maintenance, slaughter of livestock). There are an estimated 1 billion cattle heads in the world used for the production of meat, milk, leather, among other products, which are consumed by billions of people. The pressures of efficiently delivering animal products to individu...

Collaboration networks, where nodes represent authors and edges coauthorships among them, are key to understanding the consumption, production, and diffusion of knowledge. Due to social mechanisms, biases, and constraints at play, these networks are organized in tight communities with different levels of segregation. Here, we aim to quantify the ex...

In recent years, we have witnessed the world becoming more concerned with air pollution and its links to climate change. Particularly in the global north, countries are implementing systems to monitor air pollution on a large scale to aid decision making especially in urban settings. Such efforts are important but costly and cannot be implemented e...

Social structures influence human behavior, including their movement patterns. Indeed, latent information about an individual’s movement can be present in the mobility patterns of both acquaintances and strangers. We develop a “colocation” network to distinguish the mobility patterns of an ego’s social ties from those not socially connected to the...

Many of our routines and activities are linked to our ability to move; be it commuting to work, shopping for groceries, or meeting friends. Yet, factors that limit the individuals’ ability to fully realise their mobility needs will ultimately affect the opportunities they can have access to (e.g. cultural activities, professional interactions). One...

Memetic algorithms are known for their enhanced solution refinement capabilities. These capabilities are a result of incorporating local-search methods into population-based metaheuristics such as swarm and evolutionary algorithms. However, designing a memetic algorithm is not a trivial task. The inclusion of local-search procedures must consider t...

Socio-economic constructs and urban topology are crucial drivers of human mobility patterns. During the COVID-19 pandemic, these patterns were re-shaped in their main two components: the spatial dimension represented by the daily travelled distance, and the temporal dimension expressed as the synchronisation time of commuting routines. Leveraging l...

Spatio-temporal constraints coupled with social constructs have the potential to create fluid predictability to human mobility patterns. Accordingly, predictability in human mobility is non-monotonic and varies according to this spatio-socio-temporal context. Here, we propose that the predictability in human mobility is a {\em state} and not a stat...

Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines are notorious for gender imbalance favouring men. From these, Computer Science appears to among the worst. The imbalance comes despite the fact that, the proportion of women publishing impactful papers has increased over the last couple of decades. Here, we explore the potential ge...

Breast cancer is one of the deadliest forms of cancer in women but the disease has a good prognosis when diagnosed early. The gold standard for the diagnosis of breast cancer is mammography imaging analysis but the acquisition of mammograms is a painful and embarrassing procedure for women involving breast compression. Alternative methods have been...

Social structures influence a variety of human behaviors including mobility patterns, but the extent to which one individual's movements can predict another's remains an open question. Further, latent information about an individual's mobility can be present in the mobility patterns of both social and non-social ties, a distinction that has not yet...

In society, many of our routines and activities are linked to our ability to move; be it commuting to work, shopping for groceries, or meeting friends. Yet, factors that limit the individuals' ability to fully realise their mobility needs will ultimately affect the opportunities they can have access to (e.g. cultural activities, professional intera...

This book contains contributions presented at the 12th International Conference on Complex Networks (CompleNet), 24-26 May 2021. CompleNet is an international conference on complex networks that brings together researchers and practitioners from diverse disciplines—from sociology, biology, physics, and computer science—who share a passion to better...

The recent availability of digital traces from information and communications technologies has facilitated the study of both individual- and population-level movement with unprecedented spatio-temporal resolution, enabling us to better understand a plethora of socio-economic processes such as urbanization, transportation, impact on the environment...

The growing number of novel swarm-based meta-heuristics has been raising debates regarding their novelty. These algorithms often claim to be inspired by different concepts from nature but the proponents of these seldom demonstrate whether the novelty goes beyond the nature inspiration. In this work, we employed the concept of interaction networks t...

Lockdown measures put in place around the world have affected people's lives at various levels. The debate about when they should start and end is endless, with many defending variations of it which consider age, health risk, the importance of labour for society (key workers), to name a few. In certain locations in the world, particularly in develo...

Swarm intelligence is the collective behavior emerging in systems with locally interacting components. Because of their self-organization capabilities, swarm-based systems show essential properties for handling real-world problems, such as robustness, scalability, and flexibility. Yet, we fail to understand why swarm-based algorithms work well, and...

Our aim is to assess the effects of the COVID-19 restriction measures on the mobility patterns of people in the UK. These measures are strong public health policies which came into place as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic and its potential impact on the British population and on the NHS. To do so, we analyse changes in the average levels of...

This book aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from diverse disciplines—from sociology, biology, physics, and computer science—who share a passion to better understand the interdependencies within and across systems. This volume contains contributions presented at the 11th International Conference on Complex Networks (CompleNet) in...

A Health Service Area (HSA) is a group of geographic regions served by similar health care facilities. The delineation of HSAs plays a pivotal role in the characterization of health care services available in an area, enabling a better planning and regulation of health care services. Though Dartmouth HSAs have been the standard delineation for deca...

Public stakeholders implement several policies and regulations to tackle gender gaps, fostering the change in the cultural constructs associated with gender. One way to quantify if such changes elicit gender equality is by studying mobility. In this work, we study the daily mobility patterns of women and men occurring in Medell\'in (Colombia) in tw...

From online reviews and product descriptions to tweets and chats, many modern applications revolve around understanding both semantic structure and topics of short texts. Due to significant reliance on word co-occurrence, traditional topic modeling algorithms such as LDA perform poorly on sparse short texts. In this paper, we propose an unsupervise...

Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is a swarm-based algorithm inspired by the foraging behavior of ants. Despite its success, the efficiency of ACO has depended on the appropriate choice of parameters, requiring deep knowledge of the algorithm. A true understanding of ACO is linked to the (social) interactions between the agents given that it is through...

Political ideology is a major social phenomena that plays a crucial role in the formation and dynamics of ideologically-aligned social groups. This alignment gives rise to some of the most powerful social structures in modern democracies, the political parties. Due to the influence and importance of political parties in society, estimating their id...

The recent availability of digital traces from Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) has facilitated the study of both individual- and population-level movement with unprecedented spatiotemporal resolution, enabling us to better understand a plethora of socioeconomic processes such as urbanization, transportation, impact on the environm...

While precise mechanisms underlying cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are still not fully understood, previous studies suggest that the innate immune system, through Toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4), plays a crucial part in the pathways leading to these diseases, mainly because of its interplay with endogenous molecules. The Heat-shock protein 70 family (H...

Background: Increasing the number of organ donors may enhance organ transplantation, and past health interventions have shown the potential to generate both large-scale and sustainable changes, particularly among minorities. Objective: This study aimed to propose a conceptual data-driven framework that tracks digital markers of public organ dona...

BACKGROUND Increasing the number of organ donors may enhance organ transplantation, and past health interventions have shown the potential to generate both large-scale and sustainable changes, particularly among minorities. OBJECTIVE This study aimed to propose a conceptual data-driven framework that tracks digital markers of public organ donation...

Discussion forums in learning management systems (LMS) have been shown to promote student interaction and contribute to the collaborative practice in the teaching-learning process. By evaluating the postings, teachers can identify students with learning difficulties. However, due to the large volume of posts that are generated on a daily basis in t...

Computational swarm intelligence consists of multiple artificial simple agents exchanging information while exploring a search space. Despite a rich literature in the field, with works improving old approaches and proposing new ones, the mechanism by which complex behavior emerges in these systems is still not well understood. This literature gap h...

Purpose Increasing the number of organ donors can greatly enhance organ transplantation, but past health interventions have been ineffective in generating both large-scale and sustainable change, particularly among minorities. We propose to monitor and improve awareness by using a data-driven framework that employs social media to track social mark...

Educational attainment is a major indicator of a nation’s development stage. Yet, often we have to rely on census information that is done at insufficient periodicity not capturing well the dynamics of certain regions. In this context, social media can act as a sensor of populations with up-to-date information. In this paper, we focus on revealing...

Though crime is linked to different socio-economic factors, it exhibits remarkable regularities regardless of cities' particularities. In this chapter, we consider two fundamental regularities in crime regarding two essential aspects of criminal activity: time and space. For more than one century, we know that (1) crime occurs unevenly within a cit...

Emojis are emerging as an alternative way to interact and communicate online, and their large-scale adoption has the potential to reveal distinct patterns of human communication and social interactions. In this work, we investigate the hypothesis that emojis are a kind of language. By building networks of emoji co-occurrence, we examine the diversi...

This two-volume set of LNCS 11871 and 11872 constitutes the thoroughly refereed conference proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Intelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning, IDEAL 2019, held in Manchester, UK, in November 2019. The 94 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 149 submissions. These papers...

This two-volume set of LNCS 11871 and 11872 constitutes the thoroughly refereed conference proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Intelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning, IDEAL 2019, held in Manchester, UK, in November 2019. The 94 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 149 submissions. These papers...

Self-organization is a natural phenomenon that emerges in systems with a large number of interacting components. Self-organized systems show robustness, scalability, and flexibility, which are essential properties when handling real-world problems. Swarm intelligence seeks to design nature-inspired algorithms with a high degree of self-organization...

This work proposes the modeling and development of a technological solution that allows the thematic relevance analysis of the postings made by students in discussion forums, in relation to videos indicated by teachers as didactic resource to promote the deepening on the topic of discussion in the forum. For this, it was used the Text Mining for th...

Abstract In the last decades, the notion that cities are in a state of equilibrium with a centralised organisation has given place to the viewpoint of cities in disequilibrium and organised from bottom to up. In this perspective, cities are evolving systems that exhibit emergent phenomena built from local decisions. While urban evolution promotes t...

In the last decades, the notion that cities are in a state of equilibrium with a centralised organisation has given place to the viewpoint of cities in disequilibrium and organised from bottom to up. In this perspective, cities are evolving systems that exhibit emergent phenomena built from local decisions. While urban evolution promotes the emerge...

Human migration research is quite multidisciplinary and has yielded works in social sciences, physics, and even the new field of city science. International immigration has societal impacts on both the source and the destination countries at several levels such as economy, city planning, politics, and law enforcement; it leads to changes in the dem...

Emojis are very popular among online users. People use them in short texts they send or post because they are useful in conveying users’ feelings. Despite their wide use, we still do not understand the patterns in their usage. In this paper, we present an important first step towards this understanding by using a modeling based on Network Science....

In this work, we introduce a new methodology to construct a network of epicenters that avoids problems found in well-established methodologies when they are applied to global catalogs of earthquakes located in shallow zones. The new methodology involves essentially the introduction of a time window which works as a temporal filter. Our approach is...

The study of epidemic spreading in human populations has made huge strides in the last few years. Many publications have demonstrated that via the understanding of social connections as well as global movement one can understand, model and intervene on global epidemics. Studies have been successful with diseases that spread via contact as well as d...

The study of epidemic spreading in human populations has made huge strides in the last few years. Many publications have demonstrated that via the understanding of social connections as well as global movement one can understand, model and intervene on global epidemics. Studies have been successful with diseases that spread via contact as well as d...

The success of humans cannot be attributed to language, but it is certainly true that language and modern humans are inseparable. This work focuses on revealing the structure of 20 Indo-European languages belonging to three sub-families (Romance, Germanic, and Slavic) from a chronological perspective. In order to find the chronological characterist...

The problem of recognizing the author of unknown text has concerned linguistics and scientists for a long period of time. The authorship of the famous Federalist Papers remained unknown until Mosteller and Wallace solved the mystery in 1964 using the frequency of functional words. After that, many statistical and computational studies were publishe...

The problem of recognizing the author of unknown text has concerned linguistics and scientists for a long period of time. The authorship of the famous Federalist Papers remained unknown until Mosteller and Wallace solved the mystery in 1964 using the frequency of functional words. After that, many statistical and computational studies were publishe...

Firms and individuals have always searched for investment strategies that perform well and are robust to market variations. Over the years, many strategies have claimed to be effective but few resist the effect of time, that is, most of them become outdated. It turns out that markets have a “self-correcting ability”; the secretive/novel nature of s...

In online social media, people use emojis to reduce the ambiguity of short texts and to express their feelings in a more clear way. Some text messages contain more than one emoji, and this brings the idea that the sequence of emojis may have useful information that can help us better understand user behavior. One method to analyze the sequence of e...

Game theory and its application in multi-agent systems continues to attract a considerable number of scientists and researchers around the globe. Moreover, the need for distributed resource allocation is increasing at a high pace and multi-agent systems are known to be suitable to deal with these problems. In this chapter, we investigate the presen...

A movimentação de animais é considerada um dos fatores de risco para disseminar doenças. A identificação e monitoramento de áreas ou estabelecimentos de maior risco que facilitam essa condição é um trabalho árduo, uma vez que, o trânsito é complexo e intenso. Análises de risco por meio de redes complexas vem ganhando espaço em estudos na área de ep...

A movimentação de animais é considerada um dos fatores de risco para disseminar doenças. A identificação e monitoramento de áreas ou estabelecimentos de maior risco que facilitam essa condição é um trabalho árduo, uma vez que, o trânsito é complexo e intenso. Análises de risco por meio de redes complexas vem ganhando espaço em estudos na área de ep...

Swarm-based models have successfully solved real-world problems in the past two decades and yet they continue to exhibit a major shortcoming of premature convergence. Previous research suggests that an appropriate exploitation-exploration balance can prevent premature convergence and different approaches have been proposed to control this balance....

The success of humans cannot be attributed to language, but it is certainly true that language and modern humans are inseparable. Several theories about the origin of languages believe that all the languages are inherited from one language. Over time, different forms of language began to evolve, and today there are around 7,000 different languages...

Recent years have witnessed an explosion of extensive geolocated datasets related to human movement, enabling scientists to quantitatively study individual and collective mobility patterns, and to generate models that can capture and reproduce the spatiotemporal structures and regularities in human trajectories. The study of human mobility is espec...

Recent years have witnessed an explosion of extensive geolocated datasets related to human movement, enabling scientists to quantitatively study individual and collective mobility patterns, and to generate models that can capture and reproduce the spatiotemporal structures and regularities in human trajectories. The study of human mobility is espec...

In the last two decades, we have witnessed the widespread use of structural analysis of data. The area, generally called Network Science, concentrates on understanding complex phenomena by looking for properties that emerge from the relationships between the pieces of data instead of the traditional mining of the data itself. A commonly used struct...

The minority game has been studied by the scientific community in Artificial Intelligence and Multi-Agent Systems as a model for resource allocation. This paper contributes to the accumulating scientific literature in minority games by investigating an area lacking in current research: the availability of multiple resources and the effect of parame...

Crime is a major threat to society’s well-being but lacks a statistical characterization that could lead to uncovering some of its underlying mechanisms. Evidence of nonlinear scaling of urban indicators in cities, such as wages and serious crime, has motivated the understanding of cities as complex systems—a perspective that offers insights into r...

Supplementary material. (PDF)

Online social networks (e.g., Twitter) offer an open platform for people to interact and connect without restrictions of language usage or geographic borders. Because of their pervasiveness, online social networks provide data and become real-time sensors of society. This work looks at Twitter to reveal the hidden relationship of languages that ste...