DSA Thrust Seminar | Data-Driven Analytics of Human Dynamics

Human dynamics refers to interdisciplinary research of human behaviors from multiple perspectives. Low-level perspectives of human dynamics usually focus on observable behaviors of individuals like accurate recognition of hand gestures. While high-level perspectives pay more attention to invisible behaviors of crowds like how virus propagates from one person to another. Understanding those human behaviors play a vital role in various aspects of human society like marketing and urban planning. Human dynamics has thus attracted extensive attention in different disciplines. However, conventional research is largely based on manual observation, surveys, or interviews, which are limited in granularity and scenarios. With the rapid development of digital information technologies, here comes the mobile and big data era for data-driven analytics of human dynamics. These technologies keep track of our lives with digital records of the places we go, the products we buy, and the people we meet. Traditional research with data from limited observations in the controlled experimental environments has transformed into tons of data records on human communications, interactions, and activities in naturalistic environments. In this talk, I will describe the taxonomy of data-driven analytics of human dynamics; introduce the latest research challenges and opportunities; and illustrate how data-driven analytics could help in human dynamics with two of our recent works.