Social physics: uncovering human behaviour from communication

ABSTRACTIn the post year 2000 era the technologies that facilitate human communication have rapidly multiplied. While the adoption of these technologies has hugely impacted the behaviour and sociality of people, specifically in urban but also in rural environments, their ‘digital footprints’ on different data bases have become an active area of research. The existence and accessibility of such large population-level datasets, has allowed scientists to study and model innate human tendencies and social patterns in an unprecedented way that complements traditional research approaches like questionnaire studies. In this review, we focus on data analytics and modelling research – along the lines of Social Physics – as it has been carried out using the mobile phone datasets to get insight into the various aspects of human sociality, burstiness in communication, mobility patterns, and daily rhythms.