Sune Lehmann's research while affiliated with IT University of Copenhagen and other places

Publications (108)

Article
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Smartphones have profoundly changed human life. Nevertheless, the factors that shape how we use our smartphones remain unclear, in part due to limited availability of usage-data. Here, we investigate the impact of a key environmental factor: users’ exposure to urban and rural contexts. Our analysis is based on a global dataset describing mobile app...
Article
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Background Implementing a lockdown for disease mitigation is a balancing act: Non-pharmaceutical interventions can reduce disease transmission significantly, but interventions also have considerable societal costs. Therefore, decision-makers need near real-time information to calibrate the level of restrictions. Methods We fielded daily surveys in...
Preprint
Full-text available
Over the past decade, machine learning has revolutionized computers' ability to analyze text through flexible computational models. Due to their structural similarity to written language, transformer-based architectures have also shown promise as tools to make sense of a range of multi-variate sequences from protein-structures, music, electronic he...
Article
Evidence links greenspace exposure with restorative benefits to cognition and well-being, yet nature contact is declining for younger demographics. Although natural settings have been shown to restore the capacity to inhibit distracting stimuli, it remains unknown whether smartphone attention capture disrupts nature contact. Here, we analyzed ~2.5...
Preprint
Social network structures play an important role in the lives of humans and non-human animals by affecting wellbeing, the spread of disease and information, and evolutionary processes. Nevertheless, we still lack a good understanding of how these structures emerge from individual behaviour. Here we present a general model for the emergence of socia...
Article
Graph Representation Learning (GRL) has become central for characterizing structures of complex networks and performing tasks such as link prediction, node classification, network reconstruction, and community detection. Whereas numerous generative GRL models have been proposed, many approaches have prohibitive computational requirements hampering...
Article
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Terrorists use violence in pursuit of political goals. While terror often has severe consequences for victims, it remains an open question how terror attacks affect the general population. We study the behavioral response of citizens of cities affected by 7 different terror attacks. We compare real-time mobile communication patterns in the first 24...
Preprint
Full-text available
Implementing a lockdown for disease mitigation is a balancing act: Non-pharmaceutical interventions can reduce disease transmission significantly, but interventions also have considerable societal costs. Therefore, decision-makers need near real-time information to calibrate the level of restrictions. We fielded daily surveys in Denmark during the...
Article
Full-text available
The global public sphere has changed dramatically over the past decades: A significant part of public discourse now takes place on algorithmically driven platforms. Despite its growing importance, there is scant large-scale academic research on the long-term evolution of user behaviour on these platforms. Here, we evaluate the behaviour of 600,000...
Article
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Travel is expected to have a deleterious effect on sleep, but an epidemiological-scale understanding of sleep changes associated with travel has been limited by a lack of large-scale data. Our global dataset of ~20,000 individuals and 3.17 million nights (~218,000 travel nights), while focused mainly on short, non-time-zone-crossing trips, reveals...
Article
Ambient temperatures are rising worldwide, with the greatest increases recorded at night. Concurrently, the prevalence of insufficient sleep is rising in many populations. Yet it remains unclear whether warmer-than-average temperatures causally impact objective measures of sleep globally. Here, we link billions of repeated sleep measurements from s...
Article
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How should health authorities communicate to motivate the public to comply with health advice during a prolonged health crisis such as a pandemic? During the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, for example, people have had to comply with successive restrictions as the world faced multiple races between controlling new waves of the virus and the development and im...
Article
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Vaccine hesitancy is currently recognized by the WHO as a major threat to global health. Recently, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a growing interest in the role of social media in the propagation of false information and fringe narratives regarding vaccination. Using a sample of approximately 60 billion tweets, we conduct a...
Chapter
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iCourts is a research center for international courts and international law at the Faculty of Law in Copenhagen. The purpose of this book is to show how the establishment, operation and ambitions of a research center can impact a whole field of research.
Article
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Travel restrictions have proven to be an effective strategy to control the spread of the COVID-19 epidemics, in part because they help delay disease propagation across territories. The question, however, as to how different types of travel behaviour, from commuting to holiday-related travel, contribute to the spread of infectious diseases remains o...
Preprint
There is a contradiction at the heart of our current understanding of individual and collective mobility patterns. On one hand, a highly influential stream of literature on human mobility driven by analyses of massive empirical datasets finds that human movements show no evidence of characteristic spatial scales. There, human mobility is described...
Preprint
Full-text available
The global public sphere has changed dramatically over the past decades: a significant part of public discourse now takes place on algorithmically driven platforms owned by a handful of private companies. Despite its growing importance, there is scant large-scale academic research on the long-term evolution of user behaviour on these platforms, bec...
Article
Every second, the thoughts and feelings of millions of people across the world are recorded in the form of 140-character tweets using Twitter. However, despite the enormous potential presented by this remarkable data source, we still do not have an understanding of the Twitter population itself: Who are the Twitter users? How representative of the...
Preprint
The full range of activity in a temporal network is captured in its edge activity data -- time series encoding the tie strengths or on-off dynamics of each edge in the network. However, in many practical applications, edge-level data are unavailable, and the network analyses must rely instead on node activity data which aggregates the edge-activity...
Article
Full-text available
An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.
Article
An analysis of mobile-phone tracking data has revealed a universal pattern that describes the interplay between the distances travelled by humans on trips and the frequency with which those trips are made. A relationship between trip frequency and distance travelled.
Article
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Effective control of an epidemic relies on the rapid discovery and isolation of infected individuals. Because many infectious diseases spread through interaction, contact tracing is widely used to facilitate case discovery and control. However, what determines the efficacy of contact tracing has not been fully understood. Here we reveal that, compa...
Article
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Increasingly, human behavior can be monitored through the collection of data from digital devices revealing information on behaviors and locations. In the context of higher education, a growing number of schools and universities collect data on their students with the purpose of assessing or predicting behaviors and academic performance, and the CO...
Preprint
The world is facing a race between controlling new and more infectious variants of coronavirus and implementing vaccinations: How can health authorities and governments most effectively communicate the need to engage more strongly in protective behavior to avoid a collapse of the healthcare system until vaccination programs are effective? In the fi...
Article
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As courts strive to simultaneously remain self-consistent and adapt to new legal challenges, a complex network of of citations between decided cases is established. Using network science methods to analyze the underlying patterns of citations between cases can help us understand the large-scale mechanisms which shape the judicial system. Here, we u...
Article
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The uncertainty associated with epidemic forecasts is often simulated with ensembles of epidemic trajectories based on combinations of parameters. We show that the standard approach for summarizing such ensembles systematically suppresses critical epidemiological information.
Article
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There is a contradiction at the heart of our current understanding of individual and collective mobility patterns. On the one hand, a highly influential body of literature on human mobility driven by analyses of massive empirical datasets finds that human movements show no evidence of characteristic spatial scales. There, human mobility is describe...
Preprint
Full-text available
Ambient temperatures are rising globally, with the greatest increases recorded at night. Concurrently, the prevalence of insufficient sleep is increasing in many populations, with substantial costs to human health and well-being. Even though nearly a third of the human lifespan is spent asleep, it remains unknown whether temperature and weather imp...
Article
Full-text available
Study objectives: Previous research on sleep patterns across the lifespan have largely been limited to self-report measures and constrained to certain geographic regions. Using a global sleep dataset of in-situ observations from wearable activity trackers, we examine how sleep duration, timing, misalignment, and variability develop with age and va...
Preprint
Language can exert a strong influence on human behaviour. In experimental studies, it is for example well-known that the framing of an experiment or priming at the beginning of an experiment can alter participants' behaviour. However, few studies have been conducted to determine why framing or priming specific words can alter people's behaviour. He...
Preprint
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Across the world, scholars are racing to predict the spread of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19. Such predictions are often pursued by numerically simulating epidemics with a large number of plausible combinations of relevant parameters. It is essential that any forecast of the epidemic trajectory derived from the resulting ensemble of simulated cur...
Article
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Understanding which transportation modes people use is critical for smart cities and planners to better serve their citizens. We show that using information from pervasive Wi-Fi access points and Bluetooth devices can enhance GPS and geographic information to improve transportation detection on smartphones. Wi-Fi information also improves the ident...
Preprint
Terrorists use violence in pursuit of political goals. While terror often has severe consequences for victims, it remains an open question how terror attacks affect the general population. We study the behavioral response of citizens of cities affected by $7$ different terror attacks. We compare real-time mobile communication patterns in the first...
Article
Complex contagions — for example when ideas spread across a network — are thought to be different from the simple contagions observed for infections. Simple contagions are now shown to exhibit a key macroscopic characteristic of complex behaviour when they interact.
Article
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We describe the multi-layer temporal network which connects a population of more than 700 university students over a period of four weeks. The dataset was collected via smartphones as part of the Copenhagen Networks Study. We include the network of physical proximity among the participants (estimated via Bluetooth signal strength), the network of p...
Chapter
In this paper I introduce a framework for modeling temporal communication networks and dynamical processes unfolding on such networks. The framework originates from the (new) observation that there is a meaningful division of temporal communication networks into six dynamic classes, where the class of a network is determined by its generating proce...
Article
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Abstract It is widely agreed that the human brain is organized as a system of segregated modules that reside in separate regions and, through coordinated integration, support different cognitive functions. Through recent breakthroughs in modeling the activity of the brain, it has been demonstrated that each such module can participate in multiple s...
Preprint
Vaccination rates are decreasing in many areas of the world, and outbreaks of preventable diseases tend to follow in areas with particular low rates. Much research has been devoted to improving our understanding of the motivations behind vaccination decisions and the effects of various types of information offered to skeptics, no large-scale study...
Article
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With news pushed to smart phones in real time and social media reactions spreading across the globe in seconds, the public discussion can appear accelerated and temporally fragmented. In longitudinal datasets across various domains, covering multiple decades, we find increasing gradients and shortened periods in the trajectories of how cultural ite...
Article
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Abstract In this work, we investigate how court decisions aggregate citations in the European Court of Human Rights. Using the Bass model, we quantify the prevalence of the rich-get-richer phenomenon. We find that the Bass model provides an excellent description of how individual decisions accumulate citations. Our analysis reveals that citations t...
Article
Experience plays a critical role in crafting high-impact scientific work. This is particularly evident in top multidisciplinary journals, where a scientist is unlikely to appear as senior author if he or she has not previously published within the same journal. Here, we develop a quantitative understanding of author order by quantifying this “chape...
Article
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Social interactions among humans create complex networks and – despite a recent increase of online communication – the interactions mediated through physical proximity remain a fundamental way for people to connect. A common way to quantify the nature of the links between individuals is to consider repeated interactions: frequently occurring intera...
Article
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Abstract According to personality psychology, personality traits determine many aspects of human behaviour. However, validating this insight in large groups has been challenging so far, due to the scarcity of multi-channel data. Here, we focus on the relationship between mobility and social behaviour by analysing trajectories and mobile phone inter...
Preprint
Full-text available
In this work we analyze traces of mobility and co-location among a group of nearly 1\,000 closely interacting individuals. We attempt to reconstruct the Facebook friendship graph, Facebook interaction network, as well as call and SMS networks from longitudinal records of person-to-person offline proximity. We find subtle, yet observable behavioral...
Article
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Faced with effectively unlimited choices of how to spend their time, humans are constantly balancing a trade-off between exploitation of familiar places and exploration of new locations. Previous analyses have shown that at the daily and weekly timescales individuals are well characterized by an activity space of repeatedly visited locations. How t...
Chapter
In this final chapter, we consider the state-of-the-art for spreading in social systems and discuss the future of the field. As part of this reflection, we identify a set of key challenges ahead. The challenges include the following questions: how can we improve the quality, quantity, extent, and accessibility of datasets? How can we extract more i...
Article
Full-text available
According to personality psychology, personality traits determine many aspects of human behaviour. However, validating this insight in large groups has been challenging so far, due to the scarcity of multi-channel data. Here, we focus on the relationship between mobility and social behaviour by analysing two high-resolution longitudinal datasets co...
Article
In this final chapter, we consider the state-of-the-art for spreading in social systems and discuss the future of the field. As part of this reflection, we identify a set of key challenges ahead. The challenges include the following questions: how can we improve the quality, quantity, extent, and accessibility of datasets? How can we extract more i...
Article
Full-text available
Targeted vaccination, whether to minimize the forward transmission of infectious diseases or their clinical impact, is one of the 'holy grails' of modern infectious disease outbreak response, yet it is difficult to achieve in practice due to the challenge of identifying optimal targets in real time. If interruption of disease transmission is the go...
Chapter
Full-text available
Mobile phone metadata is increasingly used for humanitar- ian purposes in developing countries as traditional data is scarce. Ba- sic demographic information is however often absent from mobile phone datasets, limiting the operational impact of the datasets. For these rea- sons, there has been a growing interest in predicting demographic infor- mat...
Article
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A day in the life of a person involves a broad range of activities which are common across many people. Going beyond diurnal cycles, a central question is: to what extent do individuals act according to patterns shared across an entire population? Here we investigate the interplay between different activity types, namely communication, motion, and...
Data
Dataset file. The file is a gzip compressed text file in JSON format. (GZ)
Article
Full-text available
Humans interact through numerous communication channels to build and maintain social connections: they meet face-to-face, make phone calls or send text messages, and interact via social media. Although it is known that the network of physical contacts, for example, is distinct from the network arising from communication events via phone calls and i...
Article
Many real-world networks are representations of dynamic systems with interactions that change over time, often in uncoordinated ways and at irregular intervals. For example, university students connect in intermittent groups that repeatedly form and dissolve based on multiple factors, including their lectures, interests, and friends. Such dynamic s...
Data
Dataset details. The supporting information contains further details on the data collection process and the recorded data types. Additionally, we discuss our method on correcting attendance data on the class level and show that we observe distinct attendance-performance correlations for courses of different subject areas. (PDF)
Data
Efficiently generating unique unordered subsets. Explains and evaluates the procedure used to efficiently generate unordered subsets. (PDF)
Data
Note on data collection. Describes the procedure for recording the data. (PDF)
Data
Gaussian approximation of the poisson binomial. Demonstrates the validity of a Gaussian approximation to the Poisson binomial distribution. (PDF)
Article
NLP tasks are often limited by scarcity of manually annotated data. In social media sentiment analysis and related tasks, researchers have therefore used binarized emoticons and specific hashtags as forms of distant supervision. Our paper shows that by extending the distant supervision to a more diverse set of noisy labels, the models can learn ric...
Article
Full-text available
Identifying the factors which influence academic performance is an essential part of educational research. Previous studies have documented the importance of personality traits, class attendance, and social network structure. However, because most of these analyses were based on a single behavioral aspect and/or small sample sizes, we lack a quanti...
Article
Full-text available
The digital traces we leave behind when engaging with the modern world offer an interesting lens through which we study behavioral patterns as expression of gender. Although gender differentiation has been observed in a number of settings, the majority of studies focus on a single data stream in isolation. Here we use a dataset of high resolution d...
Article
Full-text available
It has recently become possible to study the dynamics of information diffusion in techno-social systems at scale, due to the emergence of online platforms, such as Twitter, with millions of users. One question that systematically recurs is whether information spreads according to simple or complex dynamics: does each exposure to a piece of informat...
Article
Full-text available
Identifying the factors that determine academic performance is an essential part of educational research. Existing research indicates that class attendance is a useful predictor of subsequent course achievements. The majority of the literature is, however, based on surveys and self-reports, methods which have well-known systematic biases that lead...
Data
Poisson vs Power Law Distribution for screen events. (PDF)
Data
Screen interaction events from SensibleDTU. The screen-on events including Unix timestamp and user id. (ZIP)
Article
2017, Springer International Publishing AG. Mobile phone metadata is increasingly used for humanitarian purposes in developing countries as traditional data is scarce. Basic demographic information is however often absent from mobile phone datasets, limiting the operational impact of the datasets. For these reasons, there has been a growing interes...
Article
We investigate the dynamics and interplay between human communication, movement, and social proximity by analyzing data collected from smartphones distributed among 638 individuals. The main question we consider is: to what extent do individuals act according to patterns shared across an entire population? Based on statistics of the entire populati...
Article
Humans interact through numerous channels to build and maintain social connections: they meet face-to-face, initiate phone calls or send text messages, and interact via social media. Although it is known that the network of physical contacts, for example, is distinct from the network arising from communication events via phone calls and instant mes...
Article
Today's societies are enveloped in an ever-growing telecommunication infrastructure. This infrastructure offers important opportunities for sensing and recording a multitude of human behaviors. Human mobility patterns are a prominent example of such a behavior which has been studied based on cell phone towers, Bluetooth beacons, and WiFi networks a...