Invited Speakers – Mirco Musolesi – abstract and bio

Mirco Musolesi: “Mining Big (and Small) Mobile Data for Social Good”

Abstract: An increasing amount of data describing people’s behaviour is collected by means of
applications running on smartphones or directly by mobile operators through their cellular
infrastructure. This information is extremely valuable for marketing applications, but it has also an
incredible potential to be beneficial for society as a whole, thanks to applications in a variety of
fields, from healthcare to transportation, from geodemographics to national security. In particular,
mobile data can be extremely valuable for developing and evaluating quantitative models of human
behaviour, which can be used as a basis for the development of intelligent mobile systems. In this
talk I will analyze the challenges and opportunities in using big (and small) data for applications of
high societal and commercial impact discussing the current work of my lab in the area of mobile
data mining and anticipatory mobile computing. The scope of my talk will be broad, encompassing
both modelling and systems-oriented issues.

Bio: Mirco Musolesi is a Reader in Data Science at the Department of Geography at University
College London and a Faculty Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute, the UK National Institute for Data
Science. He received a PhD in Computer Science from University College London and a Master in
Electronic Engineering from the University of Bologna. He held research and teaching positions at
Dartmouth College, Cambridge, St Andrews and Birmingham. He is a computer scientist with a
strong interest in sensing, modelling, understanding and predicting human behaviour and
dynamics in space and time, at different scales, using the “digital traces” we generate daily in our
online and offline lives. He is interested in developing mathematical and computational models as
well as implementing real-world systems based on them. This work has applications in a variety of
domains, such as intelligent systems, ubiquitous computing, networked systems, healthcare,
security&privacy, and data analytics for “social good”. More details about his research profile can
be found at: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucfamus/