Exploiting Cellular Data for Disease Containment and Information Campaigns Strategies in Country-Wide Epidemics

Human mobility is one of the key factors at the basis of the spreading of diseases in a population. Containment strategies are usually devised on movement scenarios based on coarse-grained assumptions. Mobility phone data provide a unique opportunity for building models and defining strategies based on very precise information about the movement of people in a region or in a country. Another very important aspect is the underlying social structure of a population, which might play a fundamental role in devising information campaigns to promote vaccination and preventive measures, especially in countries with a strong family (or tribal) structure. In this paper we analyze a large-scale dataset describing the mobility and the call patterns of a large number of individuals in Ivory Coast. We present a model that describes how diseases spread across the country by exploiting mobility patterns of people extracted from the available data. Then, we simulate several epidemics scenarios and we evaluate mechanisms to contain the epidemic spreading of diseases, based on the information about people mobility and social ties, also gathered from the phone call data. More specifically, we find that restricting mobility does not delay the occurrence of an endemic state and that an information campaign based on one-to-one phone conversations among members of social groups might be an effective countermeasure.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figures. Appeared in Proceedings of NetMob 2013. Boston, MA, USA. May 201

Seismic scattering and absorption mapping from intermediate-depth earthquakes reveals complex tectonic interactions acting in the Vrancea region and surroundings (Romania)

The present study was performed during a stay at the University of Münster financed by a grant awarded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) in 2014. Data used in the present study were provided by the National Institute for Earth Physics (Romania) and processed within the National Data Centre in Magurele. Seismic Analysis Code (SAC) (Goldstein and Snoke, 2005) and GMT (Wessel et al., 2013) codes were used. We thank the College of Physical Sciences (University of Aberdeen) and the Santander Mobility Award for providing travel grant to LDS to complete this manuscript. We are grateful as well to the anonymous reviewer for his useful remarks which helped us to improve the paper.Peer reviewedPostprin

Integrated Transport Planning: From Supply- to Demand-Oriented Planning. Considering the Benefits

The idea of integrated transport planning is widely accepted in the research community as well as in the field of transport policy. However, the actual implementation is still lagging behind. Acknowledging the gap between concept and reality, the benefits of a demand-oriented approach have to be reconsidered by the various stakeholders in politics, the economy, planning and civil society. In order to address this issue, we created a factual use-case by redefining empirical data (qualitative interviews) from Berlin, which our department collected in 2013 for a research project on e-mobility. The initial objective was to find out what kind of charging infrastructure would be necessary to persuade on-street parkers in densely-populated inner city areas to switch to e-mobility vehicles in the future, basically following the conventional ‚predict and provide‘-approach characteristic of traditional transport planning. In the course of the research, we decided to go against the directive and switched perspective completely in favour of a demand-approach, enquiring into people’s needs, which otherwise would have remained unidentified and invisible. Rather than creating the data to support proposed planning interventions, our method led to a much more sustainable, bottom-up planning strategy in line with the social and ecological benefits of an integrated transport planning approach and revealed the real mobility needs of people living in inner-city areas of Berlin.DFG, 414044773, Open Access Publizieren 2019 - 2020 / Technische Universität Berli

Disparities in entrepreneurship indicators across EU countries

The levels and characteristics of entrepreneurship differ widely across EU member countries due to diverse cultural, educational, economic-financial and institutional reasons. Taking as reference data provided by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), this paper analyzes the disparities in entrepreneurship indicators among the EU member countries in 2007 and 2013, highlighting the most significant changes occurred during the Great Recession. For this purpose, some of the major indices of inequality have been calculated, namely the Gini, Theil and Atkinson indices. In addition, the change in the Gini coefficient between these two years is additively decomposed into mobility and progressivity components, and growth incidence curves of some key indicators of entrepreneurial activity are estimated. Overall, we find that inequality among countries in most entrepreneurial attitude and aspiration indicators tends to diminish over the period 2007-2013. For all indicators the reduction is more generalized across the efficiency-driven economies than across the innovation-driven economies.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech