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Guillem Mosquera Donate

Publications and source records attributed to Guillem Mosquera Donate.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

Urban Analytics: Multiplexed and Dynamic Community Networks

In the past decade, cities have experienced rapid growth, expansion, and changes in their community structure. Many aspects of critical urban infrastructure are closely coupled with the human communities that they serve. Urban communities are composed of a multiplex of overlapping factors which can be distinguished into cultural, religious, social-economic, political, and geographical layers. In this paper, we review how increasingly available heterogeneous mobile big data sets can be leveraged to detect the community interaction structure using natural language processing and machine learning techniques. A number of community layer and interaction detection algorithms are then reviewed, with a particular focus on robustness, stability, and causality of evolving communities. The better understanding of the structural dynamics and multiplexed relationships can provide useful information to inform both urban planning policies and shape the design of socially coupled urban infrastructure systems.

cs.SI↗

The Spatial Ecology of War and Peace

Human flourishing is often severely limited by persistent violence. Quantitative conflict research has found common temporal and other statistical patterns in warfare, but very little is understood about its general spatial patterns. While the importance of topology in geostrategy has long been recognised, the role of spatial patterns of cities in determining a region's vulnerability to conflict has gone unexplored. Here, we show that global patterns in war and peace are closely related to the relative position of cities in a global interaction network. We find that regions with betweenness centrality above a certain threshold are often engulfed in entrenched conflict, while a high degree correlates with peace. In fact, betweenness accounts for over 80% of the variance in number of attacks. This metric is also a good predictor of the distance to a conflict zone and can estimate the risk of conflict. We conjecture that a high betweenness identifies areas with fuzzy cultural boundaries, whereas high degree cities are in cores where peace is more easily maintained. This is supported by a simple agent-based model in which cities influence their neighbours, which exhibits the same threshold behaviour with betweenness as seen in conflict data. These findings not only shed new light on the causes of violence, but could be used to estimate the risk associated with actions such as the merging of cities, construction of transportation infrastructure, or interventions in trade or migration patterns.

cs.SI↗