Welcome to the Human Mobility and Networks Lab (HuMNet) at MIT!
Information technology is more accessible than ever before across different cities world wide. This generates massive repositories of data on human communications, commercial activities, or daily mobility. This data can be transformed in useful information, for example, we can link mobility models to particular types of individuals and to target the adoption of alternative modes of transportation. By experimenting with multi layer data in urban spaces, we find, otherwise invisible, patterns of mobility and land use. These findings are intrinsically related to usage of infrastructures, transportation networks and urban organization. Ultimately, we hope that our research generates statistical models of trips and land use that can contribute to the design of more sustainable cities.
Our research efforts pursue understanding statistical laws in the context of technological applications rooted in human behavior analysis. More specifically, our research approach is based on complex network models, data mining and other statistical physics methods. Our key activities cover human mobility and network research at various scales and can be grouped in four categories: modeling trip lengths, city in motion, individual activity patterns, and spreading dynamics.
