Human dynamics
Encyclopedia
Human dynamics is a new branch of complex systems
research in statistical physics
. Its main goal is to apply the powerful conceptual toolbox developed by Physicists to study the natural world to the study of human behavior. Research in this area started to gain momentum in 2005 after the publication of A.-L. Barabási's seminal paper The origin of bursts and heavy tails in human dynamics. that introduced a queuing model that was capable, for the first time, of explaining the long tailed distribution of inter event times that naturally occur in human activity.
This paper spurred a burst of activity in this new area leading to not only further theoretical development of the Barabasi model, it's experimental verification in several different activities and the beginning of interest in using proxy tools, such as web server logs.
, cell phone records and even the rate at which registration to a major international conference occurs and the distance and rate people around the globe commute from home to work.
In recent years there has been a growing appetite for access to new data sources that might prove useful in quantifying and understanding human behavior on a collective scale.
Alexei Vázquez
João Gama Oliveira
K.-I. Goh
Guido Caldarelli
Alex Pentland
Luciano Pietronero
Cesar A. Hidalgo
Marta C. González
Jose J. Ramasco
Bruno Goncalves
Complex systems
Complex systems present problems in mathematical modelling.The equations from which complex system models are developed generally derive from statistical physics, information theory and non-linear dynamics, and represent organized but unpredictable behaviors of systems of nature that are considered...
research in statistical physics
Statistical physics
Statistical physics is the branch of physics that uses methods of probability theory and statistics, and particularly the mathematical tools for dealing with large populations and approximations, in solving physical problems. It can describe a wide variety of fields with an inherently stochastic...
. Its main goal is to apply the powerful conceptual toolbox developed by Physicists to study the natural world to the study of human behavior. Research in this area started to gain momentum in 2005 after the publication of A.-L. Barabási's seminal paper The origin of bursts and heavy tails in human dynamics. that introduced a queuing model that was capable, for the first time, of explaining the long tailed distribution of inter event times that naturally occur in human activity.
This paper spurred a burst of activity in this new area leading to not only further theoretical development of the Barabasi model, it's experimental verification in several different activities and the beginning of interest in using proxy tools, such as web server logs.
, cell phone records and even the rate at which registration to a major international conference occurs and the distance and rate people around the globe commute from home to work.
In recent years there has been a growing appetite for access to new data sources that might prove useful in quantifying and understanding human behavior on a collective scale.
People
Albert-László BarabásiAlbert-Laszlo Barabasi
Albert-László Barabási is a physicist, best known for his work in the research of network theory. He is the former Emil T...
Alexei Vázquez
João Gama Oliveira
K.-I. Goh
Guido Caldarelli
Guido Caldarelli
Guido Caldarelli is an Italian physicist and associate professor at CNR. He is married with two children and lives in Rome.-Biography:Caldarelli received his Ph.D...
Alex Pentland
Alex Pentland
Alex Pentland is the Toshiba Professor at MIT, a serial , and is one of the most cited . Pentland obtained his Ph.D. from MIT in 1981, was Lecturer at Stanford University in both computer science and psychology, and joined the MIT faculty in 1986, where he became Academic Head of the Media...
Luciano Pietronero
Luciano Pietronero
Luciano Pietronero is an Italian physicist and full professor at the department of Physics at University of Rome "Sapienza".He is also Director of the Institute of Complex Systems of CNR...
Cesar A. Hidalgo
Marta C. González
Jose J. Ramasco
Bruno Goncalves