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Spatiotemporal data, and more specifically origin-destination matrices, are critical inputs to mobility studies for transportation planning and urban management purposes. Traditionally, high-cost and hard-to-update household travel surveys are used to produce large-scale origin-destination flow information of individuals' whereabouts. In this paper, we propose a methodology to estimate origin-destination (O-D) matrices based on passively-collected cellular network signalling data of millions of anonymous mobile phone users in the Rhone-Alpes region, France. Unlike Call Detail Record (CDR) data which rely only on phone usage, signalling data include all network-based records providing higher spatiotemporal granularity. The explored dataset, which consists of time-stamped traces from 2G and 3G cellular networks with users' unique identifier and cell tower locations, is used to first analyse the cell phone activity degree indicators of each user in order to qualify the mobility information involved in these records. These indicators serve as filtering criteria to identify users whose device transactions are sufficiently distributed over the analysed period to allow studying their mobility. Trips are then extracted from the spatiotemporal traces of users for whom the home location could be detected. Trips have been derived based on a minimum stationary time assumption that enables to determine activity (stop) zones for each user. As a large, but still partial, fraction of the population is observed, scaling is required to obtain an O-D matrix for the full population. We propose a method to perform this scaling and we show that signalling data-based O-D matrix carries similar estimations as those that can be obtained via travel surveys.

Reliable and timely information on socio-economic status and divides is critical to social and economic research and policing. Novel data sources from mobile communication platforms have enabled new cost-effective approaches and models to investigate social disparity, but their lack of interpretability, accuracy or scale has limited their relevance to date. We investigate the divide in digital mobile service usage with a large dataset of 3.7 billion time-stamped and geo-referenced mobile traffic records in a major European country, and find profound geographical unevenness in mobile service usage -especially on news, e-mail, social media consumption and audio/video streaming. We relate such diversity with income, educational attainment and inequality, and reveal how low-income or low-education areas are more likely to engage in video streaming or social media and less in news consumption, information searching, e-mail or audio streaming. The digital usage gap is so large that we can accurately infer the socio-economic status of a small area or even its Gini coefficient only from aggregated data traffic. Our results make the case for an inexpensive, privacy-preserving, real-time and scalable way to understand the digital usage divide and, in turn, poverty, unemployment or economic growth in our societies through mobile phone data. This work has been supported by the research project CANCAN (Content and Context based Adaptation in Mobile Networks), grant no. ANR-18-CE25-0011, funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR). The work of M.F. was partially supported by the Atracción de Talento Investigador grant no. 2019-T1/TIC-16037 NetSense, funded by Comunidad de Madrid. E.M. and I.U. acknowledge partial support by Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad, Gobierno de España, grant nos. FIS2016-78904-C3-3-P and PID2019-106811GB-C32.

In this work, we discuss how an existing algorithm to extract long-distance trips from mobile phone data (Janzen et al., 2016 a,b) can be supplemented with man-made heuristics to arrive at plausible domestic tourism trips. In total, we detect 18,380 domestic tourism trips from mobile phone data of 69,000 users sampled in 32 cities in France. By analysing temporal, spatial and social characteristics of the domestic tourism trips, we explore several possible directions for the use of mobile phone data when studying domestic tourism on a large scale. We show how temporal patterns of mobile phone use differ from baseline behaviour, how destinations of trips can algorithmically be derived, and how future research can integrate information on the activation of the social network. Our main contribution is that we describe current barriers and sketch direction for future research. Nous discutons ici comment un algorithme d’extraction des trajets longue distance à partir de données de téléphonie mobile (Janzen et al., 2016 a,b) peut être complété par des heuristiques spécifiques afin de détecter des déplacements touristiques. Au total, nous avons détecté 18 380 voyages de tourisme interne à partir de données de 69 000 utilisateurs du mobile échantillonnés dans 32 villes françaises. En analysant les caractéristiques temporelles, spatiales et sociales de ces voyages, nous montrons comment les usages du téléphone mobile lors de ces déplacements diffèrent du comportement ordinaire, comment les destinations de voyages peuvent être dérivées algorithmiquement et comment l’information sur l’activation du réseau social pourrait être intégrée à la recherche future. L’objectif principal de ce travail est d’esquisser quelques directions possibles de l’utilisation des données collectées automatiquement par les opérateurs de télécommunication dans l’étude du tourisme interne à grande échelle.

L’article porte sur le potentiel des donnees passives de la telephonie mobile pour produire des matrices origine-destination de deplacements. L’utilisation des donnees Orange (contenant appels, SMS ainsi que les donnees de signalisation) collectees du 31 mars au 11 avril 2009 en Ile-de-France permet grâce aux estampilles spatiotemporelles, de construire une approximation de la trajectoire spatiotemporelle des utilisateurs. Cependant, une trajectoire ne suffit pas pour definir un deplacement, ce qui nous conduit a proposer une methode pour deriver des deplacements. L’objectif de cet article etant centre sur la « validation » de la matrice de deplacements issue des donnees de la telephonie mobile, nous l’avons compare a celle produite a partir de l’Enquete Globale Transport sur l’Ile-de-France. Les resultats sont tres encourageants avec des matrices relativement proches tant en structure qu’en volume. Pour conclure, nous abordons les limites de l’analyse et proposons des perspectives pour ameliorer la methodologie de production des matrices et de la comparaison.

For billing purposes, telecom operators collect communication logs of our mobile phone usage activities. These communication logs or so called CDR has emerged as a valuable data source for human behavioral studies. This work builds on the transportation modeling literature by introducing a new approach of crowdsource-based route choice behavior data collection. We make use of CDR data to infer individual route choice for commuting trips. Based on one calendar year of CDR data collected from mobile users in Portugal, we proposed and examined methods for inferring the route choice. Our main methods are based on interpolation of route waypoints, shortest distance between a route choice and mobile usage locations, and Voronoi cells that assign a route choice into coverage zones. In addition, we further examined these methods coupled with a noise filtering using Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN) and commuting radius. We believe that our proposed methods and their results are useful for transportation modeling as it provides a new, feasible, and inexpensive way for gathering route choice data, compared to costly and time-consuming traditional travel surveys. It also adds to the literature where a route choice inference based on CDR data at this detailed level&mdash, i.e., street level&mdash, has rarely been explored.

Call Detail Records provide information on the origin and destination of voice calls at the level of the base stations in a cellular network. The low spatial resolution and sparsity of these data constitutes challenges in using them for mobility characterization. In this paper we analyze the impact on the detection of commuting patterns of four parameters: density of base stations per square kilometer, average number of calls made and received per day per user, regularity of these calls, and the number of active days per user. In this study, we use CDRs collected from Portugal over a period of fourteen months. Based on the result of our study, we are able to infer the commuting patterns of 10.42% of the users in our data set by considering users with at least 7.5 calls per day. Accounting users with over 7.5 calls per day, on average, does not result in a significant improvement on the result. Concerning the inference of routes in the home-to-work direction and vice versa, we examined users who connect to the cellular network, on average, every 17 days to everyday, which results in a 0.27% to 11.1% of trips detected, respectively. Finally, we found that with 208 days of data we are able to infer 5.67% of commuting trips and this percentage does not improve significantly by considering more data.

Commuting is recurring travel between home and workplace, which accounts for most trips made daily. Understanding commuting patterns and flows is therefore essential for city and transport system design and planning. Traditionally, commuting flow information was collected using surveys and interviews, which are expensive and time-consuming. This paper introduces a way to extract commuting flow and route choice information from analyzing mobile phone communication logs. We present two new methods for inferring individual commuting route choice, which collectively constitutes city-level commuting flows. Both morning and evening flows are inferred and visualized. We believe that our methods and results are useful and contributing to both theory and practice, especially in the interdisciplinary field of urban computing and city science.

Epidemic outbreaks are an important healthcare challenge, especially in developing countries where they represent one of the major causes of mortality. Approaches that can rapidly target subpopulations for surveillance and control are critical for enhancing containment and mitigation processes during epidemics. Using a real-world dataset from Ivory Coast, this work presents an attempt to unveil the socio-geographical heterogeneity of disease transmission dynamics. By employing a spatially explicit meta-population epidemic model derived from mobile phone Call Detail Records (CDRs), we investigate how the differences in mobility patterns may affect the course of a hypothetical infectious disease outbreak. We consider different existing measures of the spatial dimension of human mobility and interactions, and we analyse their relevance in identifying the highest risk sub-population of individuals, as the best candidates for isolation countermeasures. The approaches presented in this paper provide further evidence that mobile phone data can be effectively exploited to facilitate our understanding of individuals’ spatial behaviour and its relationship with the risk of infectious diseases’ contagion. In particular, we show that CDRs-based indicators of individuals’ spatial activities and interactions hold promise for gaining insight of contagion heterogeneity and thus for developing mitigation strategies to support decision-making during country-level epidemics.

Large-scale location based traces, such as mobile phone data, have been identified as a promising data source to complement or even enrich official statistics. In many cases, a prerequisite step to deploy the massively gathered data is the detection of home location from individual users. The problem is that little research exists on the validation (comparison with ground truth datasets) or the uncertainty estimation of home detection methods, not at individual user level, nor at nation-wide levels. In this paper, we present an extensive empirical analysis of home detection methods when performed on a nation-wide mobile phone dataset from France. We analyze the validity of 9 different Home Detection Algorithms (HDAs), and we assess different sources of uncertainty. Based on 225 different set-ups for the home detection of around 18 million users we discuss different measures for validation and investigate sensitivity to user choices such as HDA parameter choice and observation period restriction. Our findings show that nation-wide performance of home detection is moderate at best, with correlations to ground truth maximizing at 0.60 only. Additionally, we show that time and duration of observation have a clear effect on performance, and that the effect of HDA criteria and parameter choice are rather small compared to other uncertainties. Our findings and discussion offer welcoming insights to other practitioners who want to apply home detection on similar datasets, or who are in need of an assessment of the challenges and uncertainties related to mobilizing mobile phone data for official statistics., Comment: 18 pages, 8 figures, 1 table. Winner of the student paper award of the BigSurv18 conference

This paper proposes a methodology for using mobile telephone based sensor data for detecting spatial and temporal differences in everyday activities in cities. Mobile telephone based sensor data has great applicability in developing urban monitoring tools and smart city solutions. The paper outlines methods for delineating indicator points of temporal events referenced as ‘midnight’ ‘morning start’ ‘midday’ and ‘duration of day’ which represent the mobile telephone usage of residents (what we call social time) rather than solar or standard time. Density maps by time quartiles were also utilized to test the versatility of this methodology and to analyze the spatial differences in cities. The methodology was tested with data from cities of Harbin (China) Paris (France) and Tallinn (Estonia). Results show that the developed methods have potential for measuring the distribution of temporal activities in cities and monitoring urban changes with georeferenced mobile phone data.

Urban dynamics are accelerated by new techniques for storing goods and information, and for transporting them and human beings. With humans, these changes raise the question of the forms of mobility and encounter that are made relevant by the ways territories are equipped for different types of flow. Theoretical concerns and technological developments share a growing focus on questions of territories and mobilities, coordination, and communication. The chapter shows how it is possible to systematically analyze mobilities and communication practices on the basis of location-specific data. The methodology on which the experimental protocol is based consists of three parts. First, an empirical apparatus for collecting and aggregating data concerning the locations of users and their communication practices. Second, two series of interviews over ten days, in which they were shown these objective data and questioned about their interpretation. The third is, use of the previous interviews to qualify the data gathered over six months.

Mobile phone datasets allow for the analysis of human behavior on an unprecedented scale. The social network, temporal dynamics and mobile behavior of mobile phone users have often been analyzed independently from each other using mobile phone datasets. In this article, we explore the connections between various features of human behavior extracted from a large mobile phone dataset. Our observations are based on the analysis of communication data of 100000 anonymized and randomly chosen individuals in a dataset of communications in Portugal. We show that clustering and principal component analysis allow for a significant dimension reduction with limited loss of information. The most important features are related to geographical location. In particular, we observe that most people spend most of their time at only a few locations. With the help of clustering methods, we then robustly identify home and office locations and compare the results with official census data. Finally, we analyze the geographic spread of users' frequent locations and show that commuting distances can be reasonably well explained by a gravity model., Comment: 16 pages, 12 figures

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 geographical confinement of human interactions within neighboring regions, extending to local levels within countries. However, models of human interaction largely ignore this effect. Here, we analyze several country-wide networks of telephone calls - both, mobile and landline - and in either case uncover a systematic decrease of communication induced by borders which we identify as the missing variable in state-of-the-art models. Using this empirical evidence, we propose an alternative modeling framework that naturally stylizes the damping effect of borders. We show that this new notion substantially improves the predictive power of widely used interaction models. This increases our ability to understand, model and predict social activities and to plan the development of infrastructures across multiple scales., Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (postdoctoral fellowship), European Commission. Future and Emerging Technologies-Open Project DATASIM (FP7-ICT-270833)

Extracting Ego-Centered Networks From Very Large Social Networks: This article presents a method at the intersection of macro and micro approaches in social networks. In examining ego-centered network, it proposes an approach to this type of study for very large networks. The calculation of several local indicators makes it possible to create aggregate statistics for each of the nodes of the network, which can then be seen as a corpus of ego-centered networks. An application is made on a network of telephone conversations between two million people, and a comparison is made with a classic ego-centered network study, based on an ethnographic research project. Social Networks, Ego-Centered Networks, Large Social Networks, Density, Communication Networks, Macro versus Micro, Qualitative Approaches (a corrected machine translation in English of this article is available on request from bms@reveus.org). Resume. Cet article presente une methode a l'intersection des approches « macro » et « micro » de l'analyse des reseaux sociaux. Prenant pour objectif l'etude de reseaux egocentres, il propose une demarche permettant ce type d'etude sur de tres grands reseaux. Le calcul de plusieurs indicateurs locaux peut en effet permettre de constituer des statistiques globales sur chacun des nœuds du reseau, qui sera alors vu comme un corpus de reseaux egocentres. Une mise en pratique est realisee sur un reseau d'echanges telephoniques entre deux millions d'individus et une comparaison est etablie avec une etude egocentree classique, s'appuyant sur une enquete ethnographique. Reseaux sociaux, Reseaux egocentres, Grands reseaux, Densite, Reseaux de communication, Macro vs. micro, Approches qualitatives. On oppose parfois deux axes dans l'analyse des reseaux 1 : l'un s'interessant a la structure d'un ensemble de liens, entre des individus possiblement tres nombreux

We report here on research aiming to reconstruct urban mobilities and communication practices through mobile phone base data. We have developed a software probe that can be implemented on a user's mobile phone, and which allows the joint recording and collection of the successive locations experienced by the user (through the identification of the cell in which the mobile phone is located) and all types of communicative acts performed through the mobile phone. This has been combined to indepth interviews with subjects over one week of their mobility and mobile communication behaviour. The method has been tested over a sample of 24 adults living in Paris, all in the 30–45 age range, half male and half female, with varying histories of mobility and professional flexibility constraints, in order to reconstruct their mobility and their communication-based activity spaces. We show how such a method enables the construction of a long time perspective on mobilities, and particularly on the articulation of displacements and mobile communication, which is an important issue in the ‘new mobilities paradigm’. We show how, over longer periods, mobility and communication practices combine into patterns marking social integration (or disintegration). We also show how our method allows us to construct new types of indicators, such as the propensity to communicate from a given type of place per unit of time, that reveal underlying patterns such as a higher propensity to call in mobile situations and transitory locations. This type of approach may be particularly relevant to the ongoing convergence of transport and communication studies, and to bridge the gap between communication research and mobility studies.

The common characteristic of Information and Communication Technology is that of being highly portable. Nevertheless, the dependence on the telecommunication operator's network and current communications infrastructures exert specific constraints on the mobile Internet user. We present the results of a study of the interactional complexities of a commuter reading WAP enabled devices. The WAP user is observed ethnographically and filmed while cell phone identification periodically gives information about the interviewee's physical location, indicating where and when the usability of a WAP device becomes difficult. In which way do communication and transport infrastructures intersect and how do people negotiate this intersection?

An intriguing open question is whether measurements derived from Big Data recording human activities can yield high-fidelity proxies of socio-economic development and well-being. Can we monitor and predict the socio-economic development of a territory just by observing the behavior of its inhabitants through the lens of Big Data? In this paper, we design a data-driven analytical framework that uses mobility measures and social measures extracted from mobile phone data to estimate indicators for socio-economic development and well-being. We discover that the diversity of mobility, defined in terms of entropy of the individual users' trajectories, exhibits (i) significant correlation with two different socio-economic indicators and (ii) the highest importance in predictive models built to predict the socio-economic indicators. Our analytical framework opens an interesting perspective to study human behavior through the lens of Big Data by means of new statistical indicators that quantify and possibly "nowcast" the well-being and the socio-economic development of a territory.

Communication mediated by various technologies (from ordinary mail to today's Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)) provides important evidence for the study of social networks. Given that networks generate the possibility of interpersonal communication, data on technology use can provide important information on sociability. However, it is also true that personal networks not only shape, but also are shaped by technological means for communication, since these entail the re-constituting of social ties and the re-drawing of social boundaries. We use material from empirical studies carried out over the last 3 years to develop our hypothesis of the way forms of relationship change with technology. In particular, we try to understand the relationship between social networks (a set of social ties possessing one or more relational dimensions), exchanges between actors (made up of a succession of embodied gestures and language acts) and the various technical means for communication available today, which enable an exchange to be completed. Each of these three poles poses constraints on interaction, and provides resources for it, and thus all three shape the form relational practices take. Empirical data show how technological means of communication allow people to re-negotiate the constraints of individual time rhythms, and of who one communicates with. They also illustrate how the relational economy (and power) is affected by the deployment of communication technologies. Tools of communication provide new resources to negotiate individual timetables and social exchanges, making it possible to adjust roles, hierarchies and forms of power in relational economies. We argue that the general change observed over the last 20 years is from established roles to mutual reachability. The traditional communication model, where tele-communication is used to connect people who are physically separated from each other, is gradually being supplanted with a new pattern of “connected presence”. In this new mode other people are telephoned, “SMSed”, seen and mailed in alternated way and small gestures or signs of attention are at least as important as the message content itself.

International audience; The recent availability of large-scale call detail record data has substantially improved our ability of quantifying human travel patterns with broad applications in epidemiology. Notwithstanding a number of successful case studies, previous works have shown that using different mobility data sources, such as mobile phone data or census surveys, to parametrize infectious disease models can generate divergent outcomes. Thus, it remains unclear to what extent epidemic modelling results may vary when using different proxies for human movements. Here, we systematically compare 658 000 simulated outbreaks generated with a spatially structured epidemic model based on two different human mobility networks: a commuting network of France extracted from mobile phone data and another extracted from a census survey. We compare epidemic patterns originating from all the 329 possible outbreak seed locations and identify the structural network properties of the seeding nodes that best predict spatial and temporal epidemic patterns to be alike. We find that similarity of simulated epidemics is significantly correlated to connectivity, traffic and population size of the seeding nodes, suggesting that the adequacy of mobile phone data for infectious disease models becomes higher when epidemics spread between highly connected and heavily populated locations, such as large urban areas.

The appearance of large geolocated communication datasets has recently increased our understanding of how social networks relate to their physical space. However, many recurrently reported properties, such as the spatial clustering of network communities, have not yet been systematically tested at different scales. In this work we analyze the social network structure of over 25 million phone users from three countries at three different scales: country, provinces and cities. We consistently find that this last urban scenario presents significant differences to common knowledge about social networks. First, the emergence of a giant component in the network seems to be controlled by whether or not the network spans over the entire urban border, almost independently of the population or geographic extension of the city. Second, urban communities are much less geographically clustered than expected. These two findings shed new light on the widely-studied searchability in self-organized networks. By exhaustive simulation of decentralized search strategies we conclude that urban networks are searchable not through geographical proximity as their country-wide counterparts, but through an homophily-driven community structure., New England University Transportation Center (Year 23 Grant), King Abdulaziz City of Science and Technology (Saudia Arabia). Center for Complex Engineering Systems, MIT-Accenture Alliance, Orange Spain (France Telecom Group), Fundacion Caja Madrid (Spain), Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) (Grant MTM2012-39101)

This study draws on itemized telephone accounts to construct aggregated, "objective", representations of relations in which telephone calls are a concrete medium. The authors have narrowed their focus to the telephone and the length of calls. Their aim is to show and interpret diverse variations in the average length of telephone conversations, such as the increase in the length of telephone interaction with distant interlocutors, the growing role of the telephone in distant emotional relationships and, lastly, the effects of pressure and regulation in the domestic sphere on week-day evenings and the way this impacts on use of the telephone during that period. They also show how the frequency of meetings has a positive influence on the frequency and length of telephone calls. This shows the need to study interpersonal relations through all modalities of interaction between the actors., Ce travail repose au départ sur l'exploitation des factures téléphoniques détaillées pour construire des représentations agrégées, « objectives », des liens dont les échanges téléphoniques constituent le support concret. Nous avons travaillé de manière très ciblée sur le téléphone et les durées de conversation téléphonique. Nous tentons de montrer et interpréter diverses variations dans les durées moyennes de conversation téléphonique, comme l'accroissement de durée des interactions téléphoniques pour les correspondants distants et le rôle accru du téléphone dans la gestion des relations affectives distantes, ainsi que les effets de pression et de régulation dans la sphère domestique en soirée, les jours de semaine, et dans la manière dont ils se répercutent sur les usages du téléphone dans cette période. Nous montrons également comment le fait de se rencontrer plus ou moins fréquemment influe positivement sur la fréquence et la durée des échanges téléphoniques, ce qui appelle à un traitement des relations interpersonnelles qui suivent les acteurs au fil de toutes leurs modalités d'interaction., Licoppe Christian, Smoreda Zbigniew. Liens sociaux et régulations domestiques dans l'usage du téléphone. De l'analyse quantitative de la durée des conversations à l'examen des interactions. In: Réseaux, volume 18, n°103, 2000. Le sexe au téléphone. pp. 253-276.

This article analyses the results of a survey in 1996 on 312 households. Data on the length of telephone conversations between men and women are examined to show an original gendered effect consisting of a distinct influence of the gender of the person called on the length of the conversation. The authors' explanation is that during a telephone conversation (analysed as comparable to a visit), rules of courtesy, the distribution of caller-called roles, and the interlocutors' gender all influence the course of the interaction. Callers tend to adjust the style of interaction in relation to the gender of the person they are calling., Nous analysons dans cet article les données issues d'une enquête réalisée en 1996 auprès de 312 foyers. Les données sur la durée des conversations téléphoniques entre hommes et femmes sont examinées pour montrer un effet de sexe original qui consiste en une claire influence du sexe de la personne appelée sur la durée des échanges téléphoniques. Nous proposons une explication selon laquelle, pendant une conversation téléphonique (analysée comme comparable à une visite), les règles de politesse, la distribution des rôles appelant-appelé et les statuts de sexe des interlocuteurs influencent le déroulement de l'interaction à travers l'ajustement par appelant de son style d'interaction au sexe de l'appelé., Smoreda Zbigniew, Licoppe Christian. Identités sexuées et statuts interactionnels. De la gestion de la durée des conversations téléphoniques. In: Réseaux, volume 18, n°103, 2000. Le sexe au téléphone. pp. 119-141.

Human mobility is differentiated by time scales. While the mechanism for long time scales has been studied, the underlying mechanism on the daily scale is still unrevealed. Here, we uncover the mechanism responsible for the daily mobility patterns by analysing the temporal and spatial trajectories of thousands of persons as individual networks. Using the concept of motifs from network theory, we find only 17 unique networks are present in daily mobility and they follow simple rules. These networks, called here motifs, are sufficient to capture up to 90 per cent of the population in surveys and mobile phone datasets for different countries. Each individual exhibits a characteristic motif, which seems to be stable over several months. Consequently, daily human mobility can be reproduced by an analytically tractable framework for Markov chains by modelling periods of high-frequency trips followed by periods of lower activity as the key ingredient., Volkswagen Foundation, NEC Corporation (Fund), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Solomon Buchsbaum Research Fund), New England University Transportation Center (Year 23 grant)

Purpose — In this chapter, we will review several alternative methods of collecting data from mobile phones for human mobility analysis. We propose considering cellular network location data as a useful complementary source for human mobility research and provide case studies to illustrate the advantages and disadvantages of each method. Methodology/approach — We briefly describe cellular phone network architecture and the location data it can provide, and discuss two types of data collection: active and passive localization. Active localization is something like a personal travel diary. It provides a tool for recording positioning data on a survey sample over a long period of time. Passive localization, on the other hand, is based on phone network data that are automatically recorded for technical or billing purposes. It offers the advantage of access to very large user populations for mobility flow analysis of a broad area. Findings — We review several alternative methods of collecting data from mobile phone for human mobility analysis to show that cellular network data, although limited in terms of location precision and recording frequency, offer two major advantages for studying human mobility. First, very large user samples – covering broad geographical areas – can be followed over a long period of time. Second, this type of data allows researchers to choose a specific data collection methodology (active or passive), depending on the objectives of their study. The big mobile phone localization datasets have provided a new impulse for the interdisciplinary research in human mobility. Originality/value of chapter — We propose considering cellular network location data as a useful complementary source for transportation research and provide case studies to illustrate the advantages and disadvantages of each proposed method. Mobile phones have become a kind of “personal sensor” offering an ever-increasing amount of location data on mobile phone users over long time periods. These data can thus provide a framework for a comprehensive and longitudinal study of temporal dynamics, and can be used to capture ephemeral events and fluctuations in day-to-day mobility behavior offering powerful tools to transportation research, urban planning, or even real-time city monitoring.

In the past few years, mobile network data are considered as a useful complementary source of information for human mobility research. Mobile phone datasets contain massive amount of spatiotemporal localization of millions of users. The analyze of such huge amount of data for mobility studies reveals many issues such as time computation, users sampling, spatiotemporal heterogeneities, semantic incompleteness. In this chapter, two issues are addressed: (1) location sampling aiming at decreasing computation time without losing useful information on the one hand and to eliminate data considered as noise in the other hand and (2) users sampling whose goal is to select users having relevant information. For the first issue two measures allowing eliminating redundant information and ping-pong positions are proposed. The second issue requires the definition of a set of measures allowing estimating mobile phone data quality. New methods to qualify mobile phone data at local and global level are proposed. The methods are tested on one-day mobile phone data coming from technical mobile network probes.

In this paper we present a method for describing how a node of a given graph is connected to the network. We also propose a method for grouping nodes into clusters based on the structure of the network in which they are embedded, so on the description provided by the first method. We apply these methods to a mobile phone communications network. When confronting the obtained clusters of individuals to their age and to their intensity of communication, the results are quite promising: the two measures are correlated to the social network cluster. We finish by providing a typology of the mobile phone users based on social network cluster, communication intensity and age.

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 number of contacts and the total communication activity grow superlinearly with city population size, according to well-defined scaling relations and resulting from a multiplicative increase that affects most citizens. Perhaps surprisingly, however, the probability that an individual's contacts are also connected with each other remains largely unaffected. These empirical results predict a systematic and scale-invariant acceleration of interaction-based spreading phenomena as cities get bigger, which is numerically confirmed by applying epidemiological models to the studied networks. Our findings should provide a microscopic basis towards understanding the superlinear increase of different socioeconomic quantities with city size, that applies to almost all urban systems and includes, for instance, the creation of new inventions or the prevalence of certain contagious diseases.

Mitchell Bridget M., Donyo Tenzing, Wissenschaftliches Institut fur Kommunikationsdienste (WIK), Zeitlin Edith, Zeitlin Nelly, Caby Laurence, Smoreda Zbigniew. L'utilisation du réseau téléphonique aux Etats-Unis . In: Réseaux, volume 12, n°67, 1994. Les jeux vidéo. pp. 153-190.

A relationship between people’s mobility and their social networks is presented based on an analysis of calling and mobility traces for one year of anonymized call detail records of over one million mobile phone users in Portugal. We find that about 80% of places visited are within just 20 km of their nearest (geographical) social ties’ locations. This figure rises to 90% at a ‘geo-social radius’ of 45 km. In terms of their travel scope, people are geographically closer to their weak ties than strong ties. Specifically, they are 15% more likely to be at some distance away from their weak ties than strong ties. The likelihood of being at some distance from social ties increases with the population density, and the rates of increase are higher for shorter geo-social radii. In addition, we find that area population density is indicative of geo-social radius where denser areas imply shorter radii. For example, in urban areas such as Lisbon and Porto, the geo-social radius is approximately 7 km and this increases to approximately 15 km for less densely populated areas such as Parades and Santa Maria da Feira.

In this paper we propose to study urban mobility by using mobile phone data. New metrics to estimate the basic properties of displacements are defined: mobility intensity (speed-like measure) and uncertainty. Mobile phone data from technical GSM network probes were used in the study. A spatiotemporal analysis of antennas activity and user mobility in Paris region is proposed in order to validate these metrics.

In this paper we introduce a new metric to estimate the basic properties of displacements: mobility intensity (speed-like measure) and uncertainty. We use mobile phone Call Detail Records from technical GSM network probes. A spatiotemporal analysis of antennas activity and user mobility is proposed using these indicators.

In this paper, a model (called the elliptic model) is proposed to estimate the number of social ties between two locations using population data in a similar manner to how transportation research deals with trips. To overcome the asymmetry of transportation models, the new model considers that the number of relationships between two locations is inversely proportional to the population in the ellipse whose foci are in these two locations. The elliptic model is evaluated by considering the anonymous communications patterns of 25 million users from three different countries, where a location has been assigned to each user based on their most used phone tower or billing zip code. With this information, spatial social networks are built at three levels of resolution: tower, city and region for each of the three countries. The elliptic model achieves a similar performance when predicting communication fluxes as transportation models do when predicting trips. This shows that human relationships are influenced at least as much by geography as is human mobility.

This paper examines the relation between power attributed to members of heterosexual couples and the perception of their personalities in terms of gender stereotyped traits. Three-hundred and fifty adults, native French subjects (women and men) participated in the study. They attributed daily family tasks and decisions to the target persons; then, they described them on the Bem Sex-Role Inventory. The results indicated strong correlations between observers' representations of power distribution in the couple and the gender related personality descriptions of the couple. The attribution of 'instrumental' traits increased (and 'expressive' traits decreased) according to the degree of power assigned to the target person of either sex. On the 'instrumentality' dimension, accentuation of perceptions of people in gender role inconsistent positions was also observed. The simultaneous influences of general gender stereotypes and specific relations between the gender roles in dyads on the perception of individuals are discussed. It is proposed that social relations of dominance provide a model for the construction of gender stereotypes and their contextual applications.

La multiplication des supports de communication et la convergence des outils de communication et d’information ont diversifie l’integration des TIC dans les pratiques sociales et complexifie les outils d’analyse permettant d’en rendre compte. Pour la methodologie de recherche, cette diversification constitue un defi, tant dans le champ des sociabilites, des consommations culturelles, que dans celui des usages des nouvelles technologies de communication. Afin de pouvoir saisir les evolutions de pratiques de communication en cours, un dispositif de recherche original, nomme Entrelacs, a ete mis au point. Il permet l’acces aux informations indispensables pour analyser les entrelacements des usages des TIC, des pratiques de loisirs et des sociabilites.

Le sport, qui fait maintenant partie des sujets d’actualite recurrents et incontournables, est au cœur des pratiques de la sociabilite ordinaire. Avec comme point d’entree la Coupe du monde football 2006, nous proposons dans cet article de discuter une des composantes de cette sociabilite, a travers les communications mobiles effectuees lors des matchs de l’equipe de France dans son parcours lors de ce Mondial. Nous analyserons la structure des echanges mobiles au regard du developpement des matchs. Nous verrons qu’il existe une forme generique de ces pratiques de communication, susceptible d’etre inflechie par des deroulements specifiques, propres a la singularite des matchs.

L’essor actuel des « technologies de rencontre » et leur agencement dans les pratiques de communication pose la question de la reconfiguration des differentes formes d’interactions et de leur place dans la formation de la sociabilite quotidienne. Cet article fait le point sur cette question en combinant les differentes sources de donnees disponibles a travers le projet Entrelacs. Nous mesurons l’ampleur de l’entrelacement entre differents outils de communication vocaux et textuels dans les pratiques : qui mobilise, conjointement ou non, telephonie, SMS, IM et mail, et quels facteurs permettent d’expliquer l’usage de ces outils ? Dans un second temps, nous montrons que ces entrelacements se deploient de maniere differenciee sur les differents reseaux de sociabilite, et font appel a des arbitrages locaux de la part des acteurs.

a diffusion des technologies de l’information et de la communication (TIC) et leurs usages ont ete largement etudies a partir des annees 1990. Cependant les projecteurs ont souvent ete pointes sur les socie-tes les plus avancees technologiquement : l'Amerique du Nord, le Japon ou l'Europe occidentale et la question de savoir comment ces processus se sont deroules dans les pays ou la diffusion a demarre plus tardivement est quelque peu laissee de cote. Cela est du a la fois au moindre poids economi-que de ces pays "en voie de numerisation", et a la plus faible visibilite des etudes locales. Pourtant de telles recherches existent, qui devaient permettre de verifier si la voie vers la generalisation des TIC est universelle ou si le rattrapage des retards technologiques prend des chemins specifiques

The paper is based on a study on the uses of the telephone in 317 French homes. Detailed billing data over four months were collected and compared with interviews concerning each regular phone user in the household. We focus here on the correlation between the observed duration of phone calls and the gender of callers and receivers. The reasons why women telephone more are discussed and related to the gender homophily in telephone networks. Data also show that the duration of phone calls depends on the receiver's gender. We suggest that politeness rules may govern the telephone call, did we argue that these civility rules explain in part why the receiver's gender exerts the greatest effect on how the call is managed and on its overall duration. We propose to explore the hypothesis that telephone calls have an interactional format similar to that of a visit, but that status differences between caller and receiver may influence the unfolding of interactions between men and women through the caller's adjustment of his or her interaction style to the receiver's gender.

National audience

National audience