The economic and social progress of our urban areas, our institutions, and our jobs depend on the diversity and resilience of the social fabric in cities. Despite their importance, several major forces erode the diversity and strength of those social connections: from income or racial segregation to differences in education and job access. In this talk, I will present our recent work to understand the fragility of the network of social connections and interactions in cities through the analysis of behavioral mobility data and its relationship with networked inequalities in experienced segregation, access to healthy food, or adaptation to the recent pandemic.
Material/papers:
Esteban Moro is a researcher, data scientist at MIT Connection Science and professor at Universidad Carlos III (UC3M) in Spain. He has published extensively throughout his career (more than 100 articles) and has led many projects funded by government agencies and private companies. Esteban's work lies in the intersection of big data, network science, and computational social science, with particular attention to human dynamics, collective intelligence, social networks, and urban mobility in problems like viral marketing, natural disaster management, or economic segregation in cities. He has received numerous awards for his research, including the “Shared University Award” from IBM in 2007 for his research in modeling viral marketing in social networks and the “Excellence in Research” Awards in 2013 and 2015 from UC3M. Esteban's work appeared in major journals, including Nature Comms. and Human Behavior, PNAS, or Science Advances, and is regularly covered by media outlets The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and El País (Spain).
