24 Jan 2018 | 5pm | The Digital Traces of Our Everyday Activities Reveal Our Urban Lifestyles

Title: The Digital Traces of our Everyday Activities Reveal our Urban Lifestyles
Speaker: Dr Riccardo Di Clemente (UCL CASA)

Is it possible to capture the socio-economic footprint of the human behavior in our cities or neighborhoods? Nowadays, all human activities, ranging from the people we call, the places we visit, the things we eat and the products we buy, generates data. This can be analyzed over long periods to paint a comprehensive portrait of human behavior within the city boundaries. These geolocated digital traces, when combined with other information streams from national census, or google api, can be used to extract information about the potential needs and the routines in the collective behavior of different groups of citizens. We will analyze this data to understand the extent to which the urban activities of different population groups or communities are driven by both socio-economic differences and cities’ structure. This new quantitative approach will provide new insights for more inclusive policies to help future urban development.

Dr. Riccardo Di Clemente is a Newton International Fellow at University College London UCL at the Centre for Advance Spatial Analysis (CASA)

The aim of his project “Socio-economic segregation, mobility dynamics and places attractiveness”  is to understand and quantify, using mobile phone data, the relationship between the features of human mobility and the social interactions which lead to the  socio-economic structures observed in cities.

Riccardo worked as PostDoctoral Associate at MIT on a project funded by the Gates Foundation and the UN to develop new methodologies using Complex systems and Computational Science tools to analyze credit card data and discover new patterns in peoples’ socio- economic behaviors.

Riccardo is a physicist by background (M.Sc and B.Sc. Sapienza University of Rome).
He received his Ph.D. in Economics (at Institute for Advanced Studies IMTLucca, Italy with visiting Institution INET@Oxford) where he discussed a thesis that applies complexity tools to Economics and Social system in order to extract strategy for policy making.
 
Website: www.riccardodiclemente.com

The seminar begins at 17:00 PM. All welcome.