Road wanderers in Brazil: a study on modern psychosocial human mobility

Human mobility patterns are quite diverse nowadays and a very singular, extreme pattern is seen in the Brazilian scene: road wandering. Road wanderers are individuals who leave their home, family, work and other territories of a settled life and throw themselves into a life of solitary wandering along Brazilian highways. This study aimed to describe the lifestyle of road wanderers, investigate the reasons that led them choose this way of living and understand it against a background of modern human mobility patterns. A total of 63 interviews were conducted with individuals wandering on road shoulders. We found road wandering is associated with the following determinants: poverty; unemployment; marital conflicts; emotional suffering following the loss of loved ones; desires for adventure and freedom; and cultural symbols related to journey, migration, exodus and other modes of displacement. Despite its particularities, road wandering can be understood as a way of human mobility in the modern world.

Statistical Physics and Modeling of Human Mobility

In this thesis, we extend some ideas of statistical physics to describe the properties of human mobility. By using a database containing GPS measures of individual paths (position, velocity and covered space at a spatial scale of 2 Km or a time scale of 30 sec), which includes the 2% of the private vehicles in Italy, we succeed in determining some statistical empirical laws pointing out "universal" characteristics of human mobility. Developing simple stochastic models suggesting possible explanations of the empirical observations, we are able to indicate what are the key quantities and cognitive features that are ruling individuals' mobility. To understand the features of individual dynamics, we have studied different aspects of urban mobility from a physical point of view. We discuss the implications of the Benford's law emerging from the distribution of times elapsed between successive trips. We observe how the daily travel-time budget is related with many aspects of the urban environment, and describe how the daily mobility budget is then spent. We link the scaling properties of individual mobility networks to the inhomogeneous average durations of the activities that are performed, and those of the networks describing people's common use of space with the fractional dimension of the urban territory. We study entropy measures of individual mobility patterns, showing that they carry almost the same information of the related mobility networks, but are also influenced by a hierarchy among the activities performed. We discover that Wardrop's principles are violated as drivers have only incomplete information on traffic state and therefore rely on knowledge on the average travel-times. We propose an assimilation model to solve the intrinsic scattering of GPS data on the street network, permitting the real-time reconstruction of traffic state at a urban scale.

Empowering and assisting natural human mobility: The simbiosis walker

This paper presents the complete development of the Simbiosis Smart Walker. The device is equipped with a set of sensor subsystems to acquire user-machine interaction forces and the temporal evolution of user's feet during gait. The authors present an adaptive filtering technique used for the identification and separation of different components found on the human-machine interaction forces. This technique allowed isolating the components related with the navigational commands and developing a Fuzzy logic controller to guide the device. The Smart Walker was clinically validated at the Spinal Cord Injury Hospital of Toledo - Spain, presenting great acceptability by spinal chord injury patients and clinical staff

Unified underpinning of human mobility in the real world and cyberspace

Acknowledgments This work is supported by National Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61573064, 61074116 and 11547188), the Youth Scholars Program of Beijing Normal University (grant No. 2014NT38), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities Beijing Nova Programme, China. XYY acknowledges the support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61304177) and the Fundamental Research Funds of BJTU (Grant No. 2015RC042).

Patterns of prehistoric human mobility in Polynesia indicated by mtDNA from the Pacific rat

Human settlement of Polynesia was a major event in world prehistory. Despite the vastness of the distances covered, research suggests that prehistoric Polynesian populations maintained spheres of continuing interaction for at least some period of time in some regions. A low level of genetic variation in ancestral Polynesian populations, genetic admixture (both prehistoric and post-European contact), and severe population crashes resulting from introduction of European diseases make it difficult to trace prehistoric human mobility in the region by using only human genetic and morphological markers. We focus instead on an animal that accompanied the ancestral Polynesians on their voyages. DNA phylogenies derived from mitochondrial control-region sequences of Pacific rats (Rattus exulans) from east Polynesia are presented. A range of specific hypotheses regarding the degree of interaction within Polynesia are tested. These include the issues of multiple contacts between central east Polynesia and the geographically distinct archipelagos of New Zealand and Hawaii. Results are inconsistent with models of Pacific settlement involving substantial isolation after colonization and confirm the value of genetic studies on commensal species for elucidating the history of human settlement.

Human Mobility, Exposure to the Built Environment, and Health

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2016-06

Physicists, stamp collectors, human mobility forecasters

One of the two reviewers studied in high school to be a physicist. In the end, he became something else, but he never lost his awe of physics. The other reviewer never intended to become a physicist, but he sometimes asks himself why he didn’t become one. Today, they are both sociologists who practice their science on an action theory basis and believe that regularities exist in the world of social actions which can be perceived, understood, explained – and even used for making predictions.

Engaging autobiography:mobility trauma and international relations

This article outlines the possibilities of autobiographical stories to criticize status quo iterations of International Relations (IR). The article draws on the personal experiences of the author’s deportation order issued by the United Kingdom’s Home Office and its associated Border Agency (UKBA) to challenge the accepted assumptions of a cosmopolitan worldview as it relates to orderly international institutional design. It highlights the possibilities of trauma when border management and personal mobility collide. It suggests that mobility trauma ensues when the expectations of human mobility, outlined in Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, infringe the state’s role as security provider. It begins in part one with a challenge to the traditional role and understanding of international borders that sustain order within the international. It examines the unacknowledged role that human vulnerability plays within IR and institutional design while frankly engaging with human vulnerability and trauma in the second section. This section details the experiences of the author when her mobility rights were curtailed and the ensuing identity crisis prompted by such events. The final section investigates the ideas of critical cosmopolitan scholarship demanding that such discourses acknowledge and work through the possibility of failed agency when the demands of state security supersede individual mobility rights. It turns to the possibility of traumatic iterations of IR in order to probe such possibilities. The article suggests, in its conclusion, the possibility of storytelling and psychoanalysis to endorse unorthodox agency, and the possibility of a dynamic international institutional design, that challenges the status quo iterations of IR.

Impact of node mobility in user-centric routing

Recent paradigms in wireless communication architectures describe environments where nodes present a highly dynamic behavior (e.g., User Centric Networks). In such environments, routing is still performed based on the regular packet-switched behavior of store-and-forward. Albeit sufficient to compute at least an adequate path between a source and a destination, such routing behavior cannot adequately sustain the highly nomadic lifestyle that Internet users are today experiencing. This thesis aims to analyse the impact of the nodes’ mobility on routing scenarios. It also aims at the development of forwarding concepts that help in message forwarding across graphs where nodes exhibit human mobility patterns, as is the case of most of the user-centric wireless networks today. The first part of the work involved the analysis of the mobility impact on routing, and we found that node mobility significance can affect routing performance, and it depends on the link length, distance, and mobility patterns of nodes. The study of current mobility parameters showed that they capture mobility partially. The routing protocol robustness to node mobility depends on the routing metric sensitivity to node mobility. As such, mobility-aware routing metrics were devised to increase routing robustness to node mobility. Two categories of routing metrics proposed are the time-based and spatial correlation-based. For the validation of the metrics, several mobility models were used, which include the ones that mimic human mobility patterns. The metrics were implemented using the Network Simulator tool using two widely used multi-hop routing protocols of Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) and Ad hoc On Demand Distance Vector (AODV). Using the proposed metrics, we reduced the path re-computation frequency compared to the benchmark metric. This means that more stable nodes were used to route data. The time-based routing metrics generally performed well across the different node mobility scenarios used. We also noted a variation on the performance of the metrics, including the benchmark metric, under different mobility models, due to the differences in the node mobility governing rules of the models.

New variational Bayesian approaches for statistical data mining : with applications to profiling and differentiating habitual consumption behaviour of customers in the wireless telecommunication industry

This thesis investigates profiling and differentiating customers through the use of statistical data mining techniques. The business application of our work centres on examining individuals’ seldomly studied yet critical consumption behaviour over an extensive time period within the context of the wireless telecommunication industry; consumption behaviour (as oppose to purchasing behaviour) is behaviour that has been performed so frequently that it become habitual and involves minimal intentions or decision making. Key variables investigated are the activity initialised timestamp and cell tower location as well as the activity type and usage quantity (e.g., voice call with duration in seconds); and the research focuses are on customers’ spatial and temporal usage behaviour. The main methodological emphasis is on the development of clustering models based on Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) which are fitted with the use of the recently developed variational Bayesian (VB) method. VB is an efficient deterministic alternative to the popular but computationally demandingMarkov chainMonte Carlo (MCMC) methods. The standard VBGMMalgorithm is extended by allowing component splitting such that it is robust to initial parameter choices and can automatically and efficiently determine the number of components. The new algorithm we propose allows more effective modelling of individuals’ highly heterogeneous and spiky spatial usage behaviour, or more generally human mobility patterns; the term spiky describes data patterns with large areas of low probability mixed with small areas of high probability. Customers are then characterised and segmented based on the fitted GMM which corresponds to how each of them uses the products/services spatially in their daily lives; this is essentially their likely lifestyle and occupational traits. Other significant research contributions include fitting GMMs using VB to circular data i.e., the temporal usage behaviour, and developing clustering algorithms suitable for high dimensional data based on the use of VB-GMM.