Title
Quantifying Information Flow During Emergencies
Abstract
Recent advances on human dynamics have focused on the normal patterns of human activities, with the quantitative understanding of human behavior under extreme events remaining a crucial missing chapter. This has a wide array of potential applications, ranging from emergency response and detection to traffic control and management. Previous studies have shown that human communications are both temporally and spatially localized following the onset of emergencies, indicating that social propagation is a primary means to propagate situational awareness. We study real anomalous events using country-wide mobile phone data, finding that information flow during emergencies is dominated by repeated communications. We further demonstrate that the observed communication patterns cannot be explained by inherent reciprocity in social networks, and are universal across different demographics.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1038/srep03997
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
Keywords
Field
DocType
human factors,injury prevention,ergonomics,emergencies,occupational safety,suicide prevention
Data science,Information flow (information theory),Social network,Situation awareness,Computer security,Computer science,Human dynamics,Reciprocity (social psychology),Demographics,Mobile phone,Health communication
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
4
null
2045-2322
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
15
0.75
10
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Liang Gao1192.14
Chaoming Song258023.58
Ziyou Gao335245.57
Albert L��szl�� Barab��si4150.75
James P. Bagrow528126.25
Dashun Wang662727.09