A SocioPatterns study during IC²S² 2017

This year, the Computational Social Science Department at GESIS, in association with the Survey Methods & Methodology Department at GESIS, the CPT in Marseille and the ISI Foundation in Turin, will host a scientific study during the conference.

By giving the possibility to record in situ close, face-to-face contacts between individuals, the setup developed by the SocioPatterns collaboration [1] has shed a new light on human interactions in various social contexts: schools, hospitals, workplaces and conferences for example. This has led to many new results about how face-to-face interactions occur, what their properties are, and how these properties constrain processes such as information and epidemic spreading [2,3,4].

The Computational Social Science Group at GESIS will deploy the SocioPatterns setup during IC²S² 2017, to repeat the experiment which was conducted during the GESIS CSS Winter Symposium in November 30 - December 1, 2016. The goal is to further understand the characteristics and the dynamics of face-to-face encounters between individuals within this particular context. The setup is very simple: every person who agrees to take part in the study will be given a small sensor to wear in their conference badge. This sensor simply detects other sensors that are close enough (less one meter). No other signal, such as GPS localisation or sound for example, is recorded. Of course, the study is anonymous. Optionally, participants will be able to share informations about their gender, institution, title (student, PhD, postdoc, professor), nationality and field of research. Such information is extremely valuable as it allows for deeper studies of the mechanisms by which people meet. Finally, in collaboration with the Survey Design and Methodology group at GESIS, an additional survey about personality type will also be deployed.

This is the second time GESIS organises a SocioPatterns study, and hopefully it will not be the last. This study is a very good opportunity to gather valuable data about human interactions, but also to present the SocioPatterns setup to the computational social science community. The Computational Social Science group at GESIS thus encourages all participants to the IC²S² 2017 to take part in this great study.

Contact:
Dr. Mathieu Génois, postdoctoral researcher at GESIS.
mathieu(dot)genois(at)gesis(dot)org

References:
[1]Dynamics of Person-to-Person Interactions from Distributed RFID Sensor Networks. Cattuto C, Van den Broeck W, Barrat A, Colizza V, Pinton JF, et al. (2010) PLOS ONE 5(7): e11596 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0011596
[2] Close Encounters in a Pediatric Ward: Measuring Face-to-Face Proximity and Mixing Patterns with Wearable Sensors. Isella et al. PLOS ONE 6(2): e17144 (2011).
[3] High-Resolution Measurements of Face-to-Face Contact Patterns in a Primary School. Stehlé et al. PLOS ONE 6(8): e23176 (2011).
[4] Contact patterns among high school students. Fournet et al. PLoS ONE 9(9):e107878 (2014).