Sebastian Grauwin

Massachusetts Institute of Technology | MIT · Senseable City Lab

Description of temporal networks and detection of dynamic communities have been hot topics of research for the last decade. However, no consensual answers to these challenges have been found due to the complexity of the task. Static communities are not well defined objects, and adding a temporal dimension makes the description even more difficult....

It is well-known that education related research is carried out within different disciplines and frameworks, but how is it specifically connected through citations to the larger social sciences and humanities? And how can this knowledge be mobilized to improve dialogue between researchers in different communities, given the benefits of integrating...

Description of temporal networks and detection of dynamic communities have been hot topics of research for the last decade. However, no consensual answers to these challenges have been found due to the complexity of the task. Static communities are not well defined objects, and adding a temporal dimension renders the description even more difficult...

Given that both computer scientists and educational researchers publish on the topic of massive open online courses (MOOCs), the research community should analyze how these disciplines approach the same topic. In order to promote productive dialogue within the community, we report on a bib-liometrics study of the growing MOOC literature and examine...

Maps of science, allowing the exploration of large‐scale bibliographical datasets, are meeting an increasing interest across a broad range of audiences: students, educators, researchers, policy makers, technology developers, etc. This paper presents BiblioMaps, a freely available software that can be used to create web‐based interactive maps of sci...

A Scientometric map of educational research based on the international Scopus database Research in educational matters covers a number of topics, a factor that raises an additional challenge for integration. We carried out a bibliographic analysis of the international Scopus database in order to describe the status of research work in, on, and arou...

The idea of a hierarchical spatial organization of society lies at the core of seminal theories in human geography that have strongly influenced our understanding of social organization. Along the same line, the recent availability of large-scale human mobility and communication data has offered novel quantitative insights hinting at a strong geogr...

Supplementary Material including additional figures and tables which provide more detailed results and further description of data collection and processing

Thanks to their widespread usage, mobile devices have become one of the main sensors of human behaviour and digital traces left behind can be used as a proxy to study urban environments. Exploring the nature of the spatio-temporal patterns of mobile phone activity could thus be a crucial step towards understanding the full spectrum of human activit...

Air pollution is now recognized as the world’s single largest environmental and human health threat. Indeed, a large number of environmental epidemiological studies have quantified the health impacts of population exposure to pollution. In previous studies, exposure estimates at the population level have not considered spatially- and temporally-var...

There are many fields of research in academia that are recognized as being multidisciplinary, and therefore use diverse frameworks and approaches. However, interdisciplinary teams also function within such fields and their work can be captured by the extent to which different types of integration (e.g. theoretical, methodological, etc.) occurs acro...

The idea of a hierarchical spatial organization of society lies at the core of seminal theories in human geography that have strongly influenced our understanding of social organization. In the same line, the recent availability of large-scale human mobility and communication data has offered novel quantitative insights hinting at a strong geograph...

The availability of big data on human activity is currently changing the way we look at our surroundings. With the high penetration of mobile phones, nearly everyone is already carrying a high-precision sensor providing an opportunity to monitor and analyze the dynamics of human movement on unprecedented scales. In this article, we present a techni...

Neste artigo, argumentamos que a nova disponibilidade de conjuntos de dados digitais nos permite revisitar a te- oria social de Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904), de maneira a dispensar inteiramente o uso de noções como “indivíduo” ou “sociedade”. Nosso argumento é que, quando era im- possível, complicado ou simplesmente lento montar e na- vegar através da...

This chapter examines the possibility to analyze and compare human activities in an urban environment based on the detection of mobile phone usage patterns. Thanks to an unprecedented collection of counter data recording the number of calls, SMS, and data transfers resolved both in time and space, we confirm the connection between temporal activity...

Intensive development of urban systems creates a number of challenges for urban planners and policy makers in order to maintain sustainable growth. Running efficient urban policies requires meaningful urban metrics, which could quantify important urban characteristics including various aspects of an actual human behavior. Since a city size is known...

Quantifying regularities in behavioral dynamics is of crucial interest for understanding collective social events such as panics or political revolutions. With the widespread use of digital communication media it has become possible to study massive data streams of user-created content in which individuals express their sentiments, often towards a...

The size of cities is known to play a fundamental role in social and economic life. Yet, its relation to the structure of the underlying network of human interactions has not been investigated empirically in detail. In this paper, we map society-wide communication networks to the urban areas of two European countries. We show that both the total nu...

“The whole is always smaller than its parts” This article suggests that the recent availability of digital data allows us to revisit the social theory of Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904) and to forego notions such as the individual or society. Our argument is that as long as it was impossible, difficult or simply tedious to gather and navigate through mas...

In this paper we argue that the new availability of digital data sets allows one to revisit Gabriel Tarde's (1843-1904) social theory that entirely dispensed with using notions such as individual or society. Our argument is that when it was impossible, cumbersome or simply slow to assemble and to navigate through the masses of information on partic...

While the size of cities is known to play a fundamental role in social and economic life, its impact on the structure of the underlying social networks is not well understood. Here, by mapping society-wide communication networks to the urban areas of two European countries, we show that both the number of social contacts and the total communication...

Using a large database (~ 215 000 records) of relevant articles, we empirically study the "complex systems" field and its claims to find universal principles applying to systems in general. The study of references shared by the papers allows us to obtain a global point of view on the structure of this highly interdisciplinary field. We show that it...

We extend simple opinion models to obtain stable but continuously evolving communities. Our scope is to meet a challenge raised by sociologists of generating "structures that last from non lasting entities". We achieve this by introducing two kinds of noise on a standard opinion model. First, agents may interact with other agents even if their opin...

We have developed a set of routines that allows to draw easily different maps of the research carried out in a scientific institution. Our toolkit uses OpenSource elements to analyze bibliometric data gathered from the Web Of Science. We take the example of our institution, ENS de Lyon, to show how different maps, using co-occurrence (of authors, k...

Physics and economics are two disciplines that share the common challenge of linking microscopic and macroscopic behaviors. However, while physics is based on collective dynamics, economics is based on individual choices. This conceptual difference is one of the main obstacles one has to overcome in order to characterize analytically economic model...

This thesis explores the problems raised by the aggregation of entities into a global, collective level, an old problem encountered in many fields of science. We work on three projects related to the aggregation problem in social systems, using tools derived from statistical physics, and more generally quantitative tools. The first project focus on...

Depuis la fin des annees 1990, la " complexite " a le vent en poupe : creation d'instituts, de formations, de reseaux, d'appels d'offres publics... on ne compte plus les actions en faveur d'une " nouvelle science " souvent creditee de resultats mirobolants - du moins par anticipation. Face a un tel engouement se pose la question des fondements de c...

Since the late 1990s, "complexity" has become a hot topic. This article presents the work undertaken at the Rhone-Alps Institute of Complex Systems on the role that institutes can play in promoting thinking on complex systems. It also draws on an empirical study of complex systems as seen through a series of articles on the natural sciences. We con...

We propose an analytical resolution of Schelling segregation model for a general class of utility functions. Using evolutionary game theory, we provide conditions under which a potential function, which characterizes the global configuration of the city and is maximized in the stationary state, exists. We use this potential function to analyze the...

In his 1971's Dynamic Models of Segregation paper, the economist Thomas C. Schelling showed that a small preference for one's neighbors to be of the same color could lead to total segregation, even if total segregation does not correspond to individual preferences nor to a residential conguration maximizing the collective utility. The present paper...

Linking microscopic and macroscopic behavior is at the heart of many natural and social sciences. This apparent similarity conceals essential differences across disciplines: Although physical particles are assumed to optimize the global energy, economic agents maximize their own utility. Here, we solve exactly a Schelling-like segregation model, wh...

In his 1971's Dynamic Models of Segregation paper, the economist Thomas C. Schelling showed that a small preference for one's neighbors to be of the same color could lead to total segregation, even if total segregation does not correspond to individual preferences and to a residential configuration maximizing the collective utility. The present work...

Recently, the counter intuitive migration phenomenon of absolute negative mobility (ANM) has been demonstrated to occur for colloidal particles in a suitably arranged post array within a microfluidic device [1]. This effect is based on the interplay of Brownian motion, nonlinear dynamics induced through microstructuring, and nonequilibrium driving,...

We present in this article an original approach to compute the electrophoretic mobility of rigid nucleo-protein complexes like nucleosomes. This model allows us to address theoretically the influence of complex position along DNA, as well as wrapped length of DNA on the electrophoretic mobility of the complex. The predictions of the model are in qu...

18 septembre 2006 Résumé As the application in microbiology go down in size, the influence of the thermal noise (Brownian motion) is less and less negligeable and can even be used in determined purposes. In especially designed microstructured channels made of poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS), the interplay of thermal noise and an alternating force is...