Macro Connections
How to transform data into knowledge.

The way we act, both individually and collectively, depends strongly on the way we see the world. The Macro Connections group focuses on the development of analytical tools that can help improve our understanding of the world's macro structures in all of their complexity. By developing methods to analyze and represent networks—such as the networks connecting countries to the products they export, or historical characters to their peers—Macro Connections research aims to help improve our understanding of the world by putting together the pieces that our scientific disciplines have helped to pull apart.

Research Projects

  • Cultural Exports

    Shahar Ronen, Amy (Zhao) Yu and César A. Hidalgo

    Cultural Exports introduces a new approach for studying both connections between countries and the cultural impact of countries. Consider a native of a certain country who becomes famous in other countries–this person is in a sense a "cultural export" of his home country "imported" to other countries. For example, the popularity of Dominican baseball player Manny Ramirez in the USA and Korea makes him a cultural export of the Dominican Republic. Using Wikipedia biographies and search-engine data, we measure the popularity of people across different countries and languages, and break it down by each person's native country, period, and occupation. This allows us to map international cultural trade and identify major exporters and importers in different fields and times, as well as hubs for cultural trade (e.g., Greece for philosophy in classical times or USA for baseball nowadays).

  • Immersion

    Deepak Jagdish, Daniel Smilkov and Cesar Hidalgo

    Immersion is a visual data experiment that delivers a fresh perspective of your email inbox. Focusing on a people-centric approach rather than the content of the emails, Immersion brings into view an important personal insight–the network of people you are connected to via email, and how it evolves over the course of many years. Given that this experiment deals with data that is extremely private, it is worthwhile to note that when given secure access to your Gmail inbox (which you can revoke anytime), Immersion only uses data from email headers and not a single word of any email's subject or body content.

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  • Place Pulse

    Phil Salesses, Anthony DeVincenzi and César A. Hidalgo

    Place Pulse is a website that allows anybody to quickly run a crowdsourced study and interactively visualize the results. It works by taking a complex question, such as “Which place in Boston looks the safest?” and breaking it down into easier to answer binary pairs. Internet participants are given two images and asked "Which place looks safer?" From the responses, directed graphs are generated and can be mined, allowing the experimenter to identify interesting patterns in the data and form new hypothesis based on their observations. It works with any city or question and is highly scalable. With an increased understanding of human perception, it should be possible for calculated policy decisions to have a disproportionate impact on public opinion.

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  • The Economic Complexity Observatory

    Alex Simoes, Dany Bahar, Ricardo Hausmann and César A. Hidalgo

    With more than six billion people and 15 billion products, the world economy is anything but simple. The Economic Complexity Observatory is an online tool that helps people explore this complexity by providing tools that can allow decision makers to understand the connections that exist between countries and the myriad of products they produce and/or export. The Economic Complexity Observatory puts at everyone’s fingertips the latest analytical tools developed to visualize and quantify the productive structure of countries and their evolution.

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  • The Language Group Network

    Shahar Ronen, Kevin Hu, Michael Xu, and César A. Hidalgo

    Most interactions between cultures require overcoming a language barrier, which is why multilingual speakers play an important role in facilitating such interactions. In addition, certain languages–not necessarily the most spoken ones–are more likely than others to serve as intermediary languages. We present the Language Group Network, a new approach for studying global networks using data generated by tens of millions of speakers from all over the world: a billion tweets, Wikipedia edits in all languages, and translations of two million printed books. Our network spans over eighty languages, and can be used to identify the most connected languages and the potential paths through which information diffuses from one culture to another. Applications include promotion of cultural interactions, prediction of trends, and marketing.

  • The Privacy Bounds of Human Mobility

    Cesar A. Hidalgo and Yves-Alexandre DeMontjoye

    We used 15 months of data from 1.5 million people to show that 4 points–approximate places and times–are enough to identify 95% of individuals in a mobility database. Our work shows that human behavior puts fundamental natural constraints to the privacy of individuals and these constraints hold even when the resolution of the dataset is low; even coarse datasets provide little anonymity. We further developed a formula to estimate the uniqueness of human mobility traces. These findings have important implications for the design of frameworks and institutions dedicated to protect the privacy of individuals.

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