Location-Based Social Simulation

At the upcoming 16th International Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Databases (SSTD) we have vision paper entitled "Location-Based Social Simulation" accepted. In the paper we discuss issues such as data sparsity and privacy concerns with using real world location-based social networks (LBSNs) like Foursquare and Yelp. To overcomes these issues, we describe how one can employ geospatial simulation (i.e. an agent-based model) to create artificial, but socially plausible LBSN data sets which overcomes some of the limitations with respect to LBSNs.

ABSTRACT:

Location-based social networks (LBSNs) have been studied extensively in recent years. However, utilizing real-world LBSN datasets in such studies has severe weaknesses: sparse and small datasets, privacy concerns, and a lack of authoritative ground-truth. Our vision is to create a large scale geosimulation framework to simulate human behavior and to create synthetic but realistic LBSN data that captures the location of users over time as well as social interactions of users in a social network. While existing LBSN datasets are trivially small, such a framework would provide the first source of very large LBSN benchmark data which would closely mimic the real world, containing high-fidelity information of location, and social connections of millions of simulated agents over several years of simulated time. Therefore, it would serve the research community by revitalizing and reshaping research on LBSNs by allowing researchers to see the (simulated) world through the lens of an omniscient entity having perfect data. These evaluations will guide future research allowing us to develop solutions to improve LBSN applications such as user-location recommendation, friend recommendation, location prediction, and location privacy.

KEYWORDS: Agent-based simulation, location-based social network, data generator, spatial network, human behavior

Full Reference: 

Kavak, H., Kim, J-S., Crooks, A.T., Pfoser, D., Wenk C. and Züfle, A (2019), Location-Based Social Simulation, Proceedings of the 16th International Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Databases, Vienna, Austria, pp 218-221. (pdf)

Update: Our paper was selected as runner-up  for best Vision Paper.

Challenges and Opportunities of Social Media Data for Socio-environmental Systems Research

SES diagram with examples of topics that
have been researched using social media data

While I have written about how one can use social media data to study cities, health issues etc... more recently we have been looking into how such data can be used to aid  Socio-environmental Systems (SES) research. SES are defined as tightly linked social and biophysical subsystems that mutually influence one another through positive and negative feedbacks.  To this end, Bianca Lopez, Nick Magliocca and myself just ahd a paper published in Land entitled "Challenges and Opportunities of Social Media Data for Socio-environmental Systems Research." 

In this paper we discuss SES and how research into them poses many challenges, not least of which are collecting or compiling data at the appropriate scales and aligning social and environmental data to address SES questions.  We discuss how SES have been studied using more traditional sources of data (e.g. census data, remote sensing etc.) and explore how social media can be used in the context of SES research. Specifically we ask three specific questions. 1) How can feedback between social and environmental systems be meaningfully studied using social media data? 2) How can using social media data re-frame or compliment current SES research questions and methods? and 3) Are there best practices for collecting and validating social media data for use in SES research? If these questions sound interesting to you, we encourage you to read the abstract below or the full paper.

Abstract:

Social media data provide an unprecedented wealth of information on people’s perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors at fine spatial and temporal scales and over broad extents. Social media data produce insight into relationships between people and the environment at scales that are generally prohibited by the spatial and temporal mismatch between traditional social and environmental data. These data thus have great potential for use in socio-environmental systems (SES) research. However, biases in who uses social media platforms and what they use them for create uncertainty in the potential insights from these data. Here, we describe ways that social media data have been used in SES research, including tracking land-use and environmental changes, natural resource use, and ecosystem service provisioning. We also highlight promising areas for future research and present best practices for SES research using social media data.

Keywords: social media; socio-ecological systems; human-environment interactions; geospatial analysis; crowdsourced data.

Example of information provided by social media posts and how it is used in analyses. A single post from a social media user.

Example of information on people’s use of natural resources from social media data based on key word searches fish and oyster from Twitter, Instagram and Foursquare.

Full Reference:

Lopez, B., Magliocca, N. and Crooks, A.T. (2019), Challenges and Opportunities of Social Media Data for Socio-environmental Systems Research, Land, 8(7), 107; https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/8/7/107/htm  (pdf)

 

Update: This review paper was awarded second prize for Best Review Paper Award in Land 2019.

Modeling Society Reacting to a Nuclear Weapon of Mass Destruction Event

Over the last couple of years we have been working on generating synthetic human populations with realistic social networks with respect to the New York mega-city and surrounding region. This is being done for a variety of modeling applications such as the spread of a disease or exploring peoples reactions to disasters (which was a topic of a recent post on Computational Social Science of Disasters).

To this end, at the upcoming International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling and; Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation (or SBP-BRiMS for short) we have a short working paper outlining some of our initial efforts to how people might react following a Nuclear Weapon of Mass Destruction (NWMD) event. In the paper we show some preliminary simulation results relating on  how we are able to simulate basic commuting patterns and initial movement away from the affected area after the NWMD event (like those in the movies below). By using a synthetic population we are able to create an artificial world populated by agents with sufficient heterogeneity to create realistic movement patterns and the social networks which play a vital role in disaster situations. If you want to know more about this work, feel free to read the abstract below or read the paper. 

Abstract:

Individual connections between human beings often dictate where people go and how they behave, yet their representation through social networks are rarely used as measures of human behavior in agent-based models. Social networks are increasingly used for study of human behavior in disasters, and empirical work has shown that human beings prioritize the safety of themselves and loved ones (i.e., households) before helping neighbors and coworkers. Based on this assumption we have created a set of heuristics for modeling how agents behave in an emergency event and how the individual behavior aggregates into a variety of patterns of life. In this paper will present briefly our agent-based model being used to characterize the population’s reaction to a Nuclear Weapon of Mass Destruction (NWMD) event in the New York City region. Agents are modeled commuting on work-day schedules before the explosion of a small (10Kt) nuclear device. After the explosion, agents respond to signals in their environment and make decisions based on prioritization of safety for themselves and those in their networks. The model methodology demonstrates how social networks can be integrated into an agent-based model and act as a basis for decision-making, and preliminary simulations show how agents potentially respond to a NWMD event with measurable changes in location and network formations over space and time. 

Keywords: Agent-Based Model, Human Behavior, Social Networks, Emergency, Disaster Response, Nuclear Weapon of Mass Destruction.

Various patterns of commuting behavior representing daily routines of the individual agents.

Full Reference:

Burger, A. G., Kennedy, W.G., Crooks, A.T., Jiang, N. and Guillen-Piazza, D. (2019), Modeling Society Reacting to a Nuclear Weapon of Mass Destruction Event, 2019 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling and Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation, Washington DC. (pdf)