%0 Journal Article %J International Journal of Data Science and Analytics %D 2016 %T An analytical framework to nowcast well-being using mobile phone data %A Luca Pappalardo %A Maarten Vanhoof %A Lorenzo Gabrielli %A Zbigniew Smoreda %A Dino Pedreschi %A Fosca Giannotti %X 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. %B International Journal of Data Science and Analytics %V 2 %P 75–92 %G eng %R 10.1007/s41060-016-0013-2 %0 Journal Article %J Computer Communications %D 2016 %T Special Issue on Mobile Traffic Analytics %A Marco Fiore %A Zubair Shafiq %A Zbigniew Smoreda %A Razvan Stanica %A Roberto Trasarti %X This Special Issue of Computer Communications is dedicated to mobile traffic data analysis. This is an emerging field of research that stems from the increasing pervasiveness in our lives of always-connected mobile devices. These devices continuously collect, generate, receive or communicate data; in doing so, they leave trails of digital crumbs that can be followed, recorded and analysed in many and varied ways, and for a number of different purposes. From a data collection perspective, applications running on smartphones allow tracking user activities with extreme accuracy, in terms of mobility, context, and service usage. Yet, having individuals informedly install and run software that monitors their actions is not obvious; finding adequate incentives is equivalently complex. The other option is gathering mobile traffic data in the mobile network. This is an increasingly common practice for telecommunication operators: the collection of minimum information required for billing is giving way to in-depth inspection and recording of mobile service usages in space and time, and of traffic flows at the network edge and core. In this case, data access remains the major impediment, due to privacy and industrial secrecy reasons. Despite the issues inherent to the data collection, the richness of knowledge that can be extracted from the aforementioned sources is such that actors in both academia and industry are putting significant effort in gathering, analysing and possibly making available mobile traffic data. Indeed, mobile traffic data typically contain information on large populations of individuals (from thousands to millions users) with high spatio-temporal granularity. The combination of accuracy and coverage is unprecedented, and it has proven key in validating theories and scaling up experimental studies in a number of research fields across many disciplines, including physics, sociology, epidemiology, transportation systems, and, of course, mobile networking. As a result, we witness today a rapid growth of the literature that proposes or exploits mobile traffic analytics. Included in this Special Issue are eight papers that cover a significant portion of the different research topics in this area, ranging from data collection to the characterization of land use and mobile service consumption, from the inference and prediction of user mobility to the detection of malicious traffic. These papers were selected from 30 high-quality submissions after at least two rounds of reviews by experts and guest editors. The original submissions were received from five continents and a variety of countries, including Austria, Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, China, France, Germany, Italy, South Korea, Luxembourg, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Sweden, Tunisia, Turkey, USA. The accepted papers reflect this geographical heterogeneity, and are authored by researchers based in Europe, North and South America. %B Computer Communications %V 95 %P 1–2 %G eng %U http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.comcom.2016.10.009 %R 10.1016/j.comcom.2016.10.009 %0 Conference Paper %B NetMob %D 2015 %T Detecting and understanding big events in big cities %A Barbara Furletti %A Lorenzo Gabrielli %A Roberto Trasarti %A Zbigniew Smoreda %A Maarten Vanhoof %A Cezary Ziemlicki %X Recent studies have shown the great potential of big data such as mobile phone location data to model human behavior. Big data allow to analyze people presence in a territory in a fast and effective way with respect to the classical surveys (diaries or questionnaires). One of the drawbacks of these collection systems is incompleteness of the users' traces; people are localized only when they are using their phones. In this work we define a data mining method for identifying people presence and understanding the impact of big events in big cities. We exploit the ability of the Sociometer for classifying mobile phone users in mobility categories through their presence profile. The experiment in cooperation with Orange Telecom has been conduced in Paris during the event F^ete de la Musique using a privacy preserving protocol. %B NetMob %C Boston %8 04/2015 %G eng %U http://www.netmob.org/assets/img/netmob15_book_of_abstracts_posters.pdf %0 Journal Article %J Telecommunications Policy %D 2014 %T Discovering urban and country dynamics from mobile phone data with spatial correlation patterns %A Roberto Trasarti %A Ana-Maria Olteanu-Raimond %A Mirco Nanni %A Thomas Couronné %A Barbara Furletti %A Fosca Giannotti %A Zbigniew Smoreda %A Cezary Ziemlicki %K Urban dynamics %X Abstract Mobile communication technologies pervade our society and existing wireless networks are able to sense the movement of people, generating large volumes of data related to human activities, such as mobile phone call records. At the present, this kind of data is collected and stored by telecom operators infrastructures mainly for billing reasons, yet it represents a major source of information in the study of human mobility. In this paper, we propose an analytical process aimed at extracting interconnections between different areas of the city that emerge from highly correlated temporal variations of population local densities. To accomplish this objective, we propose a process based on two analytical tools: (i) a method to estimate the presence of people in different geographical areas; and (ii) a method to extract time- and space-constrained sequential patterns capable to capture correlations among geographical areas in terms of significant co-variations of the estimated presence. The methods are presented and combined in order to deal with two real scenarios of different spatial scale: the Paris Region and the whole France. %B Telecommunications Policy %P - %U http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308596113002012 %R http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.telpol.2013.12.002