Heterogeneity in social and epidemiological factors determines the risk of measles outbreaks.

Political and environmental factors-e.g., regional conflicts and global warming-increase large-scale migrations, posing extraordinary societal challenges to policymakers of destination countries. A common concern is that such a massive arrival of people-often from a country with a disrupted healthcare system-can increase the risk of vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks like measles. We analyze human flows of 3.5 million (M) Syrian refugees in Turkey inferred from massive mobile-phone data to verify this concern. We use multilayer modeling of interdependent social and epidemic dynamics to demonstrate that the risk of disease reemergence in Turkey, the main host country, can be dramatically reduced by 75 to 90% when the mixing of Turkish and Syrian populations is high. Our results suggest that maximizing the dispersal of refugees in the recipient population contributes to impede the spread of sustained measles epidemics, rather than favoring it. Targeted vaccination campaigns and policies enhancing social integration of refugees are the most effective strategies to reduce epidemic risks for all citizens.

Give more data, awareness and control to individual citizens, and they will help COVID-19 containment.

The rapid dynamics of COVID-19 calls for quick and effective tracking of virus transmission chains and early detection of outbreaks, especially in the "phase 2" of the pandemic, when lockdown and other restriction measures are progressively withdrawn, in order to avoid or minimize contagion resurgence. For this purpose, contact-tracing apps are being proposed for large scale adoption by many countries. A centralized approach, where data sensed by the app are all sent to a nation-wide server, raises concerns about citizens' privacy and needlessly strong digital surveillance, thus alerting us to the need to minimize personal data collection and avoiding location tracking. We advocate the conceptual advantage of a decentralized approach, where both contact and location data are collected exclusively in individual citizens' "personal data stores", to be shared separately and selectively (e.g., with a backend system, but possibly also with other citizens), voluntarily, only when the citizen has tested positive for COVID-19, and with a privacy preserving level of granularity. This approach better protects the personal sphere of citizens and affords multiple benefits: it allows for detailed information gathering for infected people in a privacy-preserving fashion; and, in turn this enables both contact tracing, and, the early detection of outbreak hotspots on more finely-granulated geographic scale. The decentralized approach is also scalable to large populations, in that only the data of positive patients need be handled at a central level. Our recommendation is two-fold. First to extend existing decentralized architectures with a light touch, in order to manage the collection of location data locally on the device, and allow the user to share spatio-temporal aggregates-if and when they want and for specific aims-with health authorities, for instance. Second, we favour a longer-term pursuit of realizing a Personal Data Store vision, giving users the opportunity to contribute to collective good in the measure they want, enhancing self-awareness, and cultivating collective efforts for rebuilding society.

The interplay between individual social behavior and clinical symptoms in small clustered groups.

BACKGROUND: Mixing patterns of human populations play a crucial role in shaping the spreading paths of infectious diseases. The diffusion of mobile and wearable devices able to record close proximity interactions represents a great opportunity for gathering detailed data on social interactions and mixing patterns in human populations. The aim of this study is to investigate how social interactions are affected by the onset of symptomatic conditions and to what extent the heterogeneity in human behavior can reflect a different risk of infection. METHODS: We study the relation between individuals' social behavior and the onset of different symptoms, by making use of data collected in 2009 among students sharing a dormitory in a North America university campus. The dataset combines Bluetooth proximity records between study participants with self-reported daily records on their health state. Specifically, we investigate whether individuals' social activity significantly changes during different symptomatic conditions, including those defining Influenza-like illness, and highlight to what extent possible heterogeneities in social behaviors among individuals with similar age and daily routines may be responsible for a different risk of infection for influenza. RESULTS: Our results suggest that symptoms associated with Influenza-like illness can be responsible of a reduction of about 40% in the average duration of contacts and of 30% in the daily time spent in social interactions, possibly driven by the onset of fever. However, differences in the number of daily contacts were found to be not statistically significant. In addition, we found that individuals who experienced clinical influenza during the study period were characterized by a significantly higher social activity. In particular, both the number of person-to-person contacts and the time spent in social interactions emerged as significant risk factors for influenza infection. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings highlight that Influenza-like illness can remarkably reduce the social activity of individuals and strengthen the idea that the heterogeneity in social habits among individuals can significantly contribute in shaping differences among the individuals' risk of infection.

Temporal clustering of social interactions trades-off disease spreading and knowledge diffusion.

Non-pharmaceutical measures such as preventive quarantines, remote working, school and workplace closures, lockdowns, etc. have shown effectiveness from an epidemic control perspective; however, they have also significant negative consequences on social life and relationships, work routines and community engagement. In particular, complex ideas, work and school collaborations, innovative discoveries and resilient norms formation and maintenance, which often require face-to-face interactions of two or more parties to be developed and synergically coordinated, are particularly affected. In this study, we propose an alternative hybrid solution that balances the slowdown of epidemic diffusion with the preservation of face-to-face interactions, that we test simulating a disease and a knowledge spreading simultaneously on a network of contacts. Our approach involves a two-step partitioning of the population. First, we tune the level of node clustering, creating 'social bubbles' with increased contacts within each bubble and fewer outside, while maintaining the average number of contacts in each network. Second, we tune the level of temporal clustering by pairing, for a certain time interval, nodes from specific social bubbles. Our results demonstrate that a hybrid approach can achieve better trade-offs between epidemic control and complex knowledge diffusion. The versatility of our model enables tuning and refining clustering levels to optimally achieve the desired trade-off, based on the potentially changing characteristics of a disease or knowledge diffusion process.

Crime, inequality and public health: a survey of emerging trends in urban data science.

Urban agglomerations are constantly and rapidly evolving ecosystems, with globalization and increasing urbanization posing new challenges in sustainable urban development well summarized in the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The advent of the digital age generated by modern alternative data sources provides new tools to tackle these challenges with spatio-temporal scales that were previously unavailable with census statistics. In this review, we present how new digital data sources are employed to provide data-driven insights to study and track (i) urban crime and public safety; (ii) socioeconomic inequalities and segregation; and (iii) public health, with a particular focus on the city scale.

The rhythms of transient relationships: allocating time between weekdays and weekends.

A fundamental question of any new relationship is, will it last? Transient relationships, recently defined by the authors, are an ideal type of social tie to explore this question: these relationships are characterized by distinguishable starting and ending temporal points, linking the question of tie longevity to relationship finite lifetime. In this study, we use mobile phone data sets from the UK and Italy to analyse the weekly allocation of time invested in maintaining transient relationships. We find that more relationships are created during weekdays, with a greater proportion of them receiving more contact during these days of the week in the long term. The smaller group of relationships that receive more phone calls during the weekend tend to remain active for more time. We uncover a sorting process by which some ties are moved from weekdays to weekends and vice versa, mostly in the first half of the relationship. This process also carries more information about the ultimate lifetime of a tie than the part of the week when the relationship started, which suggests an early evaluation period that leads to a decision on how to allocate time to different types of transient ties.

The stability of transient relationships.

In contrast to long-term relationships, far less is known about the temporal evolution of transient relationships, although these constitute a substantial fraction of people's communication networks. Previous literature suggests that ratings of relationship emotional intensity decay gradually until the relationship ends. Using mobile phone data from three countries (US, UK, and Italy), we demonstrate that the volume of communication between ego and its transient alters does not display such a systematic decay, instead showing a lack of any dominant trends. This means that the communication volume of egos to groups of similar transient alters is stable. We show that alters with longer lifetimes in ego's network receive more calls, with the lifetime of the relationship being predictable from call volume within the first few weeks of first contact. This is observed across all three countries, which include samples of egos at different life stages. The relation between early call volume and lifetime is consistent with the suggestion that individuals initially engage with a new alter so as to evaluate their potential as a tie in terms of homophily.

Modeling international mobility using roaming cell phone traces during COVID-19 pandemic.

Most of the studies related to human mobility are focused on intra-country mobility. However, there are many scenarios (e.g., spreading diseases, migration) in which timely data on international commuters are vital. Mobile phones represent a unique opportunity to monitor international mobility flows in a timely manner and with proper spatial aggregation. This work proposes using roaming data generated by mobile phones to model incoming and outgoing international mobility. We use the gravity and radiation models to capture mobility flows before and during the introduction of non-pharmaceutical interventions. However, traditional models have some limitations: for instance, mobility restrictions are not explicitly captured and may play a crucial role. To overtake such limitations, we propose the COVID Gravity Model (CGM), namely an extension of the traditional gravity model that is tailored for the pandemic scenario. This proposed approach overtakes, in terms of accuracy, the traditional models by 126.9% for incoming mobility and by 63.9% when modeling outgoing mobility flows.

The impact of control and mitigation strategies during the second wave of coronavirus infections in Spain and Italy.

European countries struggled to fight against the second and the third waves of the COVID-19 pandemic, as the Test-Trace-Isolate (TTI) strategy widely adopted over the summer and early fall 2020 failed to contain the spread of the disease effectively. This paper sheds light on the effectiveness of such a strategy in two European countries (Spain and Italy) by analysing data from June to December 2020, collected via a large-scale online citizen survey with 95,251 and 43,393 answers in Spain and Italy, respectively. Our analysis describes several weaknesses in each of the three pillars of the TTI strategy: Test, Trace, and Isolate. We find that 40% of respondents had to wait more than 48 hours to obtain coronavirus tests results, while literature has shown that a delay of more than one day might make tracing all cases inefficient. We also identify limitations in the manual contact tracing capabilities in both countries, as only 29% of respondents in close contact with a confirmed infected individual reported having been contact traced. Moreover, our analysis shows that more than 45% of respondents report being unable to self-isolate if needed. We also analyse the mitigation strategies deployed to contain the second wave of coronavirus. We find that these interventions were particularly effective in Italy, where close contacts were reduced by more than 20% in the general population. Finally, we analyse the participants' perceptions about the coronavirus risk associated with different daily activities. We observe that they are often gender- and age-dependent, and not aligned with the actual risk identified by the literature. This finding emphasises the importance of deploying public-health communication campaigns to debunk misconceptions about SARS-CoV-2. Overall, our work illustrates the value of online citizen surveys to quickly and efficiently collect large-scale population data to support and evaluate policy decisions to combat the spread of infectious diseases, such as coronavirus.

Generating mobility networks with generative adversarial networks.

The increasingly crucial role of human displacements in complex societal phenomena, such as traffic congestion, segregation, and the diffusion of epidemics, is attracting the interest of scientists from several disciplines. In this article, we address mobility network generation, i.e., generating a city's entire mobility network, a weighted directed graph in which nodes are geographic locations and weighted edges represent people's movements between those locations, thus describing the entire mobility set flows within a city. Our solution is MoGAN, a model based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to generate realistic mobility networks. We conduct extensive experiments on public datasets of bike and taxi rides to show that MoGAN outperforms the classical Gravity and Radiation models regarding the realism of the generated networks. Our model can be used for data augmentation and performing simulations and what-if analysis.

The Interaction between Serotonin Transporter Allelic Variation and Maternal Care Modulates Instagram Sociability in a Sample of Singaporean Users.

Human social interactions ensure recognition and approval from others, both in offline and online environments. This study applies a model from behavioral genetics on Instagram sociability to explore the impact of individual development on behavior on social networks. We hypothesize that sociable attitudes on Instagram resulted from an interaction between serotonin transporter gene alleles and the individual's social relationship with caregivers. We assess the environmental and genetic components of 57 Instagram users. The self-report questionnaire Parental Bonding Instrument is adopted to determine the quality of parental bonding. The number of posts, followed users ("followings"), and followers are collected from Instagram as measures of online social activity. Additionally, the ratio between the number of followers and followings ("Social Desirability Index") was calculated to estimate the asymmetry of each user's social network. Finally, buccal mucosa cell samples were acquired, and the polymorphism rs25531 (T/T homozygotes vs. C-carriers) within the serotonin transporter gene was examined. In the preliminary analysis, we identified a gender effect on the number of followings. In addition, we specifically found a gene-environment interaction on the standardized Instagram "Social Desirability Index" in line with our predictions. Users with the genotype more sensitive to environmental influences (T/T homozygotes) showed a higher Instagram "Social Desirability Index" than nonsensitive ones (C-carriers) when they experienced positive maternal care. This result may contribute to understanding online social behavior from a gene*environment perspective.

Measuring close proximity interactions in summer camps during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Policy makers have implemented multiple non-pharmaceutical strategies to mitigate the COVID-19 worldwide crisis. Interventions had the aim of reducing close proximity interactions, which drive the spread of the disease. A deeper knowledge of human physical interactions has revealed necessary, especially in all settings involving children, whose education and gathering activities should be preserved. Despite their relevance, almost no data are available on close proximity contacts among children in schools or other educational settings during the pandemic. Contact data are usually gathered via Bluetooth, which nonetheless offers a low temporal and spatial resolution. Recently, ultra-wideband (UWB) radios emerged as a more accurate alternative that nonetheless exhibits a significantly higher energy consumption, limiting in-field studies. In this paper, we leverage a novel approach, embodied by the Janus system that combines these radios by exploiting their complementary benefits. The very accurate proximity data gathered in-field by Janus, once augmented with several metadata, unlocks unprecedented levels of information, enabling the development of novel multi-level risk analyses. By means of this technology, we have collected real contact data of children and educators in three summer camps during summer 2020 in the province of Trento, Italy. The wide variety of performed daily activities induced multiple individual behaviors, allowing a rich investigation of social environments from the contagion risk perspective. We consider risk based on duration and proximity of contacts and classify interactions according to different risk levels. We can then evaluate the summer camps' organization, observe the effect of partition in small groups, or social bubbles, and identify the organized activities that mitigate the riskier behaviors. Overall, we offer an insight into the educator-child and child-child social interactions during the pandemic, thus providing a valuable tool for schools, summer camps, and policy makers to (re)structure educational activities safely.

Ethical machines: The human-centric use of artificial intelligence.

Today's increased availability of large amounts of human behavioral data and advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are contributing to a growing reliance on algorithms to make consequential decisions for humans, including those related to access to credit or medical treatments, hiring, etc. Algorithmic decision-making processes might lead to more objective decisions than those made by humans who may be influenced by prejudice, conflicts of interest, or fatigue. However, algorithmic decision-making has been criticized for its potential to lead to privacy invasion, information asymmetry, opacity, and discrimination. In this paper, we describe available technical solutions in three large areas that we consider to be of critical importance to achieve a human-centric AI: (1) privacy and data ownership; (2) accountability and transparency; and (3) fairness. We also highlight the criticality and urgency to engage multi-disciplinary teams of researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and citizens to co-develop and evaluate in the real-world algorithmic decision-making processes designed to maximize fairness, accountability, and transparency while respecting privacy.

How can big data shape the field of non-religion studies? And why does it matter?

The shift of attention from the decline of organized religion to the rise of post-Christian spiritualities, anti-religious positions, secularity, and religious indifference has coincided with the deconstruction of the binary distinction between "religion" and "non-religion"-initiated by spirituality studies throughout the 1980s and recently resumed by the emerging field of non-religion studies. The current state of cross-national surveys makes it difficult to address the new theoretical concerns due to (1) lack of theoretically relevant variables, (2) lack of longitudinal data to track historical changes in non-religious positions, and (3) difficulties in accessing small and/or hardly reachable sub-populations of religious nones. We explore how user profiling, text analytics, automatic image classification, and various research designs based on the integration of survey methods and big data can address these issues as well as shape non-religion studies, promote its institutionalization, stimulate interdisciplinary cooperation, and improve the understanding of non-religion by redefining current methodological practices.

Temporal properties of higher-order interactions in social networks.

Human social interactions in local settings can be experimentally detected by recording the physical proximity and orientation of people. Such interactions, approximating face-to-face communications, can be effectively represented as time varying social networks with links being unceasingly created and destroyed over time. Traditional analyses of temporal networks have addressed mostly pairwise interactions, where links describe dyadic connections among individuals. However, many network dynamics are hardly ascribable to pairwise settings but often comprise larger groups, which are better described by higher-order interactions. Here we investigate the higher-order organizations of temporal social networks by analyzing five publicly available datasets collected in different social settings. We find that higher-order interactions are ubiquitous and, similarly to their pairwise counterparts, characterized by heterogeneous dynamics, with bursty trains of rapidly recurring higher-order events separated by long periods of inactivity. We investigate the evolution and formation of groups by looking at the transition rates between different higher-order structures. We find that in more spontaneous social settings, group are characterized by slower formation and disaggregation, while in work settings these phenomena are more abrupt, possibly reflecting pre-organized social dynamics. Finally, we observe temporal reinforcement suggesting that the longer a group stays together the higher the probability that the same interaction pattern persist in the future. Our findings suggest the importance of considering the higher-order structure of social interactions when investigating human temporal dynamics.

Serotonin Transporter Gene Polymorphisms and Maternal Overprotection Regulate Adult Social Expectations on Close Relationships.

Humans are evolutionary-driven to adult mating and conceive social expectations on the quality of their affiliations. The genetic susceptibility to adverse environments in critical periods can alter close relationships. The current research investigates how the promoter region of the Serotonin Transporter Gene (5-HTTLPR) and perceived caregiving behavior in childhood could influence the social expectations on close adult relationships. For this purpose, 5-HTTLPR data was collected from the buccal mucosa of 65 Italian individuals (33 males). The participants filled (a) the Parental Bonding Instrument (PBI) to provide the levels of care and overprotection from mother and father, and (b) the Experience in Close Relationships-Revised (ECR-R) to report the social expectations on the intimate relationship assessed in terms of anxiety and avoidance from the partner. An interaction effect between 5-HTTLPR and PBI dimensions on the ECR-R scores was hypothesized. Results confirmed that the interplay between the genetic groups and history of maternal overprotection predicted avoidance experienced in romantic relationships in adulthood. Moreover, both adult anxiety and avoidance felt in an intimate relationship were found to covary as a function of maternal overprotection. The present work proposes further evidence of the genetic and parental mechanisms regulating social expectations involved in close relationships.

Living in a pandemic: changes in mobility routines, social activity and adherence to COVID-19 protective measures.

Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs), aimed at reducing the diffusion of the COVID-19 pandemic, have dramatically influenced our everyday behaviour. In this work, we study how individuals adapted their daily movements and person-to-person contact patterns over time in response to the NPIs. We leverage longitudinal GPS mobility data of hundreds of thousands of anonymous individuals to empirically show and quantify the dramatic disruption in people's mobility habits and social behaviour. We find that local interventions did not just impact the number of visits to different venues but also how people experience them. Individuals spend less time in venues, preferring simpler and more predictable routines, also reducing person-to-person contacts. Moreover, we find that the individual patterns of visits are influenced by the strength of the NPIs policies, the local severity of the pandemic and a risk adaptation factor, which increases the people's mobility regardless of the stringency of interventions. Finally, despite the gradual recovery in visit patterns, we find that individuals continue to keep person-to-person contacts low. This apparent conflict hints that the evolution of policy adherence should be carefully addressed by policymakers, epidemiologists and mobility experts.

Recalled Parental Bonding Interacts with Oxytocin Receptor Gene Polymorphism in Modulating Anxiety and Avoidance in Adult Relationships.

Early interactions with significant individuals affect social experience throughout the course of a lifetime, as a repeated and prolonged perception of different levels of care, independence, or control influences the modulation of emotional regulatory processes. As many factors play a role in shaping the expectations and features of social interaction, in this study, we considered the influence of parental bonding and genetic allelic variation of oxytocin receptor gene polymorphism (rs53576) over levels of experienced anxiety and avoidance in 313 young adults belonging to two different cultural contexts, namely Italy and Singapore. Results highlighted a major effect of maternal characteristics, care, and overprotection, with differences between the two cultural groups. Additionally, the interaction between rs53576 and maternal overprotection suggested different environmental susceptibility in the Italian sample and the Singaporean one. Implications for clinical work and future steps are described in the Conclusion.

Modulation of Instagram Number of Followings by Avoidance in Close Relationships in Young Adults under a Gene x Environment Perspective.

Social networking sites have determined radical changes in human life, demanding investigations on online socialization mechanisms. The knowledge acquired on in-person sociability could guide researchers to consider both environmental and genetic features as candidates of online socialization. Here, we explored the impact of the quality of adult attachment and the genetic properties of the Serotonin Transporter Gene (5-HTTLPR) on Instagram social behavior. Experiences in Close Relationships-Revised questionnaire was adopted to assess 57 Instagram users' attachment pattern in close relationships with partners. Genotypes from the 5-HTTLPR/rs25531 region were extracted from the users' buccal mucosa and analyzed. Users' Instagram social behavior was examined from four indexes: number of posts, number of followed users ("followings") and number of followers, and the Social Desirability Index calculated from the followers to followings ratio. Although no interaction between rs25531 and ECR-R dimensions was found, an association between avoidance in close relationships and Instagram number of followings emerged. Post hoc analyses revealed adult avoidance from the partner predicts the Instagram number of followings with good evidence. Moreover, users reporting high avoidance levels displayed fewer followings than users who reported low levels of avoidance. This research provides a window into the psychobiological understanding of online socialization on Instagram.

The relation between oxytocin receptor gene polymorphisms, adult attachment and Instagram sociability: An exploratory analysis.

Oxytocin is a primary neuropeptide which coordinates affiliative behavior. Previous researchers pointed to the association between genetic vulnerability on Oxytocin Receptor Gene (OXTR) and environmental factors (e.g., social relationships) to comprehend social behavior. Although an extensive knowledge of in-person social interactions has been obtained, little is known about online sociability. A gene-environment perspective is adopted to examine how OXTR and adult attachment moderate Instagram behavior. The genetic factors within the regions OXTR/rs53576 (A/A homozygotes vs G-carriers) and OXTR/rs2254298 (G/G homozygotes vs A-carriers) were assessed. The Experience in Close Relationships-Revised (ECR-R) questionnaire was used to collect participants' (N = 57, 16 males) attachment with a partner. The number of posts, followed people ("followings") and followers were obtained from Instagram, and the Social Desirability Index (SDI) was calculated as the ratio of followers to followings. Interaction effects between OXTR groups and ECR-R scores on the number of posts and SDI were hypothesized. Results showed an effect of rs53576 on the number of Instagram followings. Specifically, people with A/A OXTR/rs53576 genotype had more followings than G-carriers independent of the anxiety or avoidance felt towards their partner. These preliminary results offer insights into future investigations on social media behavior.