Our group focuses on understanding and modeling collective phenomena, from first principles, and in an interdisciplinary way.
Collective phenomena can be defined as the patterns of behavior displayed by systems of many interacting elements such as atoms of a gas, the population of a city and its myriad social relations, or data packets traveling through a computer network. The behaviors that emerge in such systems are usually not simple additive effects of its elements. Instead, new patterns arise as a result of the collection of interactions, e.g. social segregation and disparity in cities and data congestion in communication networks.
Some of the main projects we focus on include:
- Patterns of human communication with transient alters
- Job mobility inside large organizations
- Statistics of human conflict
- Human time use, mobility, and socio-economic micro patterns
- Research on improving research
Please see Research for additional details.