It is not just that things are connected, but how they are connected that ultimately matters when trying to understand systems. In this presentation Hidalgos summarize some of his recent work in which connections among diseases, people, products, and countries, were mapped out to improve our understanding of illness, social interactions, human mobility, and economic development. He briefly summarizes how (i) we constructed the Phenotypic Disease Network, using more than 34 million insurance records, (ii) how the persistence of social interactions can be connected to the structure of the social network using mobile phone records, (iii) how we can discover the statistical features of human travel using mobile phone data, and (iv) how the complexity and development of countries can be understood through the product space and by studying the network connecting countries to the products they export. Throughout the presentation several data visualizations constructed for these projects, and around them, will be presented.
César A. Hidalgo, a native of Santiago de Chile, is a research fellow at Harvard's Center for International Development and an adjunct lecturer in public policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. His work focuses on improving the understanding of systems using and developing concepts of complexity, evolution and network science. His areas of application include (i) economic development, where he has pioneered the use of networks to quantify the productive structure of countries and its evolution; (ii) systems biology, where he has published work on disease co-morbidity and genetic regulation; and (iii) social systems, where he has worked on human mobility and social network analysis using mobile phone data. César A. Hidalgo holds a PhD in physics from the University of Notre Dame.
