|Talks|

Understanding human behaviors: A computational social science perspective

Visiting speaker
Hybrid
Visiting speaker
Past Talk
Bruno Lepri
Fondazione Bruno Kessler
Apr 4, 2024
1:00 pm
Apr 4, 2024
1:00 pm
In-person
4 Thomas More St
London E1W 1YW, UK
The Roux Institute
Room
100 Fore Street
Portland, ME 04101
Network Science Institute
2nd floor
Network Science Institute
11th floor
177 Huntington Ave
Boston, MA 02115
Network Science Institute
2nd floor
Room
58 St Katharine's Way
London E1W 1LP, UK

Talk recording

The transition of data from being a scarce resource to a massive and real-time processed stream is rapidly changing the world we live in, challenging and often subverting long-lasting paradigms in a broad range of domains. Finance, economics, politics, journalism, medicine, biology, and physics, to name a few, have been disrupted by the existence of large amounts of data. The almost universal adoption of mobile phones, the exponential growth in the usage of Internet services and social media platforms, and the proliferation of digital payment systems, wearable devices, and connected objects has led to the existence of unprecedented amounts of data about human behavior. We live in an unprecedented historic moment where the availability of vast amounts of human behavioral data, combined with advances in machine learning, are enabling us to build predictive computational models of human behavior.In my talk, I will show examples of how those computational models of human behaviors can be used to better understand and to design more efficient companies, cities, and societies. I will also discuss key human-centric requirements for a positive disruption of these novel approaches including a fundamental renegotiation of user-centric data ownership and management, the development of tools and participatory infrastractures towards increased algorithmic transparency and accountability, and the creation of living labs for experimenting and co-creating data-driven policies.

About the speaker
Bruno Lepri leads the Mobile and Social Computing Lab (MobS Lab) at Fondazione Bruno Kessler (Trento, Italy) and he is vice-coordinator of the Complex Data Analytics research line. Bruno is also visiting scientist at the MIT Media Lab working with Human Dynamics group and with the MIT Connection Science initiative. He is currently responsible for the research tasks definition of the Mobile Territorial Lab, a living lab launched in November 2012 by Telecom Italia, FBK, MIT Media Lab and Telefonica involving more than 100 families in Trento. In 2013 he co-organized the Telecom Italia Big Data Challenge. In 2010 he won a Marie Curie Cofund post-doc fellow and he has hold post-doc positions at MIT Media Lab and FBK.
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Apr 04, 2024