NETI Lab is home to research projects aimed at developing innovative mathematical models and computational tools to better characterize, understand, and anticipate large-scale complex networks and systems.
Millions commute to work every day in cities and interact with colleagues, customers, providers, friends, and strangers. Commuting facilitates the mixing of people from distant and diverse neighbourhoods, but whether this has an imprint on social inclusion or instead, connections remain segregated is less explored. In this project we use geolocated Twitter messages to track the mobility of thousands of users in the 50 largest metropolitan areas of the United States. We combine information on individual commuting with the online social network of users and socio-economic data on their neighborhoods. We use this unique dataset to understand (1) how mobility shapes social relationships of people from different communities, (2) how online social connections, mobility and physical infrastructure connect neighborhoods inside cities, (3) how the online social network of people from lower income neighborhoods differ from the network of people living in rich areas of cities.