arXiv subjects

Mariana Macedo

Publications and source records attributed to Mariana Macedo.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

The parenthood effect in urban mobility

We investigate how parenthood and marriage (two major life events) reshape urban mobility patterns, an aspect overlooked in traditional `average citizen' mobility models. Leveraging US census data, we analyse whether these life transitions create distinct urban experiences. Parenthood introduces new priorities including caregiving responsibilities, work-life balance adjustments, and access to family-friendly environments. Similarly, marriage introduces new dynamics including shared household decision-making, potential dual-income benefits, combined residential preferences, and shifts in social networks and lifestyle patterns. Our analysis demonstrates that cities vary significantly in how mobility can be accommodated by different household arrangements: some better accommodate either single individuals (Houston, Virginia Beach) or married people (Atlanta, Baltimore), whereas others favour parents (Cincinnati, Chicago). This classification becomes increasingly relevant for individuals and families as remote work expands relocation possibilities. We find that parents and married individuals face different mobility costs and amenity access patterns compared to their counterparts, with variations consistent across multiple null model tests. This research advances urban planning discourse by advocating for tailored design strategies addressing diverse demographic needs rather than one-size-fits-all approaches.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2025

Vector fields as a framework for modelling the mobility of commodities

Commodities, including livestock, flow through trade networks globally, with trajectories that can be effectively captured using mobility pattern modelling approaches similar to those used in human mobility studies. However, documenting these movements comprehensively presents significant challenges; it can be unrealistic, costly, and may conflict with data protection regulations. As a result, mobility datasets typically contain uncertainties due to sparsity and limitations in data collection. Origin-destination (OD) representations offer a powerful framework for modelling movement patterns and are widely adopted in mobility studies. However, these matrices possess inherent limitations: locations absent from the OD framework lack spatial information on potential mobility directions and intensities. This spatial incompleteness creates analytical gaps across different geographical scales, constraining our ability to characterise movement patterns in underrepresented areas. In this study, we introduce a vector-field-based method to address these data challenges, transforming OD data into vector fields capturing spatial flow patterns comprehensively enabling us to study mobility directions solidly. We use cattle trade data from Minas Gerais, Brazil, as our case study for commodity flows. This region's large livestock trading network makes it an ideal test case. Cattle movements are significant as they affect disease transmission, including foot-and-mouth disease. Accurately modelling these flows allows better surveillance and control strategies. Our vector-field approach reveals fundamental patterns in commodity mobility and can infer movement information for unrepresented locations. Our approach offers an alternative to traditional network-based models, enhancing our capacity to infer mobility patterns from incomplete datasets and advancing our understanding of large-scale commodity trades.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2025

Systematic comparison of gender inequality in scientific rankings across disciplines

The participation of women in academia has increased in the last few decades across many fields (e.g., Computer Science, History, Medicine). However, this increase in the participation of women has not been the same at all career stages. Here, we study how gender participation within different fields is related to gender representation in top-ranking positions in productivity (number of papers), research impact (number of citations), and co-authorship networks (degree of connectivity). We analyzed over 80 million papers published from 1975 to 2020 in 19 academic fields. Our findings reveal that women remain a minority in all 19 fields, with physics, geology, and mathematics having the lowest percentage of papers authored by women at 14% and psychology having the largest percentage at 39%. Women are significantly underrepresented in top-ranking positions (top 10% or higher) across all fields and metrics (productivity, citations, and degree), indicating that it remains challenging for early researchers (especially women) to reach top-ranking positions, as our results reveal the rankings to be rigid over time. Finally, we show that in most fields, women and men with comparable productivity levels and career age tend to attain different levels of citations, where women tend to benefit more from co-authorships, while men tend to benefit more from productivity, especially in pSTEMs. Our findings highlight that while the participation of women has risen in some fields, they remain under-represented in top-ranking positions. Greater gender participation at entry levels often helps representation, but stronger interventions are still needed to achieve long-lasting careers for women and their participation in top-ranking positions.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2024

Mapping Election Polarization and Competitiveness using Election Results

The simplified hypothesis that an election is polarized as an explanation of recent electoral outcomes worldwide is centered on perceptions of voting patterns rather than ideological data from the electorate. While the literature focuses on measuring polarization using ideological-like data from electoral studies-which are limited to economically advantageous countries and are representative mostly to national scales-we argue that, in fact, voting patterns can lead to mapping effective proxies of citizen divisions on election day. This paper perspectives two complementary concepts, Election Polarization (EP) and Election Competitiveness (EC), as a means to understand voting patterns on Election Day. We present an agnostic approach that relies solely on election data and validate it using synthetic and real-world election data across 13 countries in the Eurozone, North America, Latin America, and New Zealand. Overall, we find that we can label and distinguish expectations of polarized and competitive elections in these countries, and we report that EP positively correlates with a metric of political polarization in the U.S., unlocking opportunities for studies of polarization at the regional level and for lower/middle-income countries where electoral studies are available, but surveys are limited.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2024

Gender differences in online communication: A case study of Soccer

Social media and digital platforms allow us to express our opinions freely and easily to a vast number of people. In this study, we examine whether there are gender-based differences in how communication happens via Twitter in regard to soccer. Soccer is one of the most popular sports, and therefore, on social media, it engages a diverse audience regardless of their technical knowledge. We collected Twitter data for three months (March-June) for English and Portuguese that contains 9.5 million Tweets related to soccer, and only 18.38% tweets were identified as belonging to women, highlighting a possible gender gap already in the number of people who participated actively in this topic. We then conduct a fine-grained text-level and network-level analysis to identify the gender differences that might exist while communicating on Twitter. Our results show that women express their emotions more intensely than men, regardless of the differences in volume. The network generated from Portuguese has lower homophily than English. However, this difference in homophily does not impact how females express their emotions and sentiments, suggesting that these aspects are inherent norms or characteristics of genders. Our study unveils more gaps through qualitative and quantitative analyses, highlighting the importance of examining and reporting gender gaps in online communication to create a more inclusive space where people can openly share their opinions.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2023

Understanding Political Divisiveness using Online Participation data from the 2022 French and Brazilian Presidential Elections

Digital technologies can augment civic participation by facilitating the expression of detailed political preferences. Yet, digital participation efforts often rely on methods optimized for elections involving a few candidates. Here we present data collected in an online experiment where participants built personalized government programs by combining policies proposed by the candidates of the 2022 French and Brazilian presidential elections. We use this data to explore aggregates complementing those used in social choice theory, finding that a metric of divisiveness, which is uncorrelated with traditional aggregation functions, can identify polarizing proposals. These metrics provide a score for the divisiveness of each proposal that can be estimated in the absence of data on the demographic characteristics of participants and that explains the issues that divide a population. These findings suggest divisiveness metrics can be useful complements to traditional aggregation functions in direct forms of digital participation.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2023

Measuring and Controlling Divisiveness in Rank Aggregation

In rank aggregation, members of a population rank issues to decide which are collectively preferred. We focus instead on identifying divisive issues that express disagreements among the preferences of individuals. We analyse the properties of our divisiveness measures and their relation to existing notions of polarisation. We also study their robustness under incomplete preferences and algorithms for control and manipulation of divisiveness. Our results advance our understanding of how to quantify disagreements in collective decision-making.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2022

Differences in the spatial landscape of urban mobility: gender and socioeconomic perspectives

Many of our routines and activities are linked to our ability to move; be it commuting to work, shopping for groceries, or meeting friends. Yet, factors that limit the individuals' ability to fully realise their mobility needs will ultimately affect the opportunities they can have access to (e.g., cultural activities, professional interactions). One important aspect frequently overlooked in human mobility studies is how gender-centred issues can amplify other sources of mobility disadvantages (e.g., socioeconomic inequalities), unevenly affecting the pool of opportunities men and women have access to. In this work, we leverage on a combination of computational, statistical, and information-theoretical approaches to investigate the existence of systematic discrepancies in the mobility diversity (i.e., the diversity of travel destinations) of (1) men and women from different socioeconomic backgrounds, and (2) work and non-work travels. Our analysis is based on datasets containing multiple instances of large-scale, official, travel surveys carried out in three major metropolitan areas in South America: Medellín and Bogotá in Colombia, and São Paulo in Brazil. Our results indicate the presence of general discrepancies in the urban mobility diversities related to the gender and socioeconomic characteristics of the individuals. Lastly, this paper sheds new light on the possible origins of gender-level human mobility inequalities, contributing to the general understanding of disaggregated patterns in human mobility.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2019

Gender Patterns of Human Mobility in Colombia: Reexamining Ravenstein's Laws of Migration

Public stakeholders implement several policies and regulations to tackle gender gaps, fostering the change in the cultural constructs associated with gender. One way to quantify if such changes elicit gender equality is by studying mobility. In this work, we study the daily mobility patterns of women and men occurring in Medellín (Colombia) in two years: 2005 and 2017. Specifically, we focus on the spatiotemporal differences in the travels and find that purpose of travel and occupation characterise each gender differently. We show that women tend to make shorter trips, corroborating Ravenstein's Laws of Migration. Our results indicate that urban mobility in Colombia seems to behave in agreement with the "archetypal" case studied by Ravenstein.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2019

Uncovering the Social Interaction in Swarm Intelligence with Network Science

Swarm intelligence is the collective behavior emerging in systems with locally interacting components. Because of their self-organization capabilities, swarm-based systems show essential properties for handling real-world problems such as robustness, scalability, and flexibility. Yet, we do not know why swarm-based algorithms work well and neither we can compare the different approaches in the literature. The lack of a common framework capable of characterizing these several swarm-based algorithms, transcending their particularities, has led to a stream of publications inspired by different aspects of nature without a systematic comparison over existing approaches. Here, we address this gap by introducing a network-based framework---the interaction network---to examine computational swarm-based systems via the optics of the social dynamics of such interaction network; a clear example of network science being applied to bring further clarity to a complicated field within artificial intelligence. We discuss the social interactions of four well-known swarm-based algorithms and provide an in-depth case study of the Particle Swarm Optimization. The interaction network enables researchers to study swarm algorithms as systems, removing the algorithm particularities from the analyses while focusing on the structure of the social interactions.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2019

Characterizing the Social Interactions in the Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm

Computational swarm intelligence consists of multiple artificial simple agents exchanging information while exploring a search space. Despite a rich literature in the field, with works improving old approaches and proposing new ones, the mechanism by which complex behavior emerges in these systems is still not well understood. This literature gap hinders the researchers' ability to deal with known problems in swarms intelligence such as premature convergence, and the balance of coordination and diversity among agents. Recent advances in the literature, however, have proposed to study these systems via the network that emerges from the social interactions within the swarm (i.e., the interaction network). In our work, we propose a definition of the interaction network for the Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm. With our approach, we captured striking idiosyncrasies of the algorithm. We uncovered the different patterns of social interactions that emerge from each type of bee, revealing the importance of the bees variations throughout the iterations of the algorithm. We found that ABC exhibits a dynamic information flow through the use of different bees but lacks continuous coordination between the agents.

cs.NE↗