Please register for the CV & Online Identity Workshop below.

Our understanding about the structure and dynamics of social systems has been developed considerably during the last years due to the recent availability of large digital behavioural datasets. However, although these studies consider the structural, temporal, or spatial characters of human actions and interactions, they commonly miss one important dimension regarding the socioeconomic status of people. The uneven distribution of wealth and individual economic capacities are among the main forces, which shape modern societies and determine people’s behaviour in peace time or even during an emergency. The observations of these effects, however, is difficult as they require the simultaneous access of socioeconomic and behavioural data about the same set of individuals. In this talk, we will discuss a set of results aiming to bridge this gap by using the combinations of mobile-phone communication, bank transaction, satellite, online social system and human mobility datasets. We will find that socioeconomic disparities lead to segregation patterns not only in space but in the social network structure and mobility patterns of people. Finally, we will discuss how the changes of behavioural patterns can be followed during an emergency situation and how such external shocks induce the reorganisation of the observed segregation patterns.