Publications (14)
Good Fences: The Importance of Setting Boundaries for Peaceful Coexistence
Alex Rutherford, Dion Harmon, Justin Werfel +4
We consider the conditions of peace and violence among ethnic groups, testing a theory designed to predict the locations of violence and interventions that can promote peace. Chara…
Impossible by Conventional Means: Ten Years on from the DARPA Red Balloon Challenge
Alex Rutherford, Manuel Cebrian, Inho Hong +1
Ten years ago, DARPA launched the 'Network Challenge', more commonly known as the 'DARPA Red Balloon Challenge'. Ten red weather balloons were fixed at unknown locations in the US.…
Inferring Mechanisms for Global Constitutional Progress
Alex Rutherford, Yonatan Lupu, Manuel Cebrian +3
Constitutions help define domestic political orders, but are known to be influenced by two international mechanisms: one that reflects global temporal trends in legal development,…
Estimating Food Consumption and Poverty Indices with Mobile Phone Data
Adeline Decuyper, Alex Rutherford, Amit Wadhwa +5
Recent studies have shown the value of mobile phone data to tackle problems related to economic development and humanitarian action. In this research, we assess the suitability of…
Mapping the Privacy-Utility Tradeoff in Mobile Phone Data for Development
Alejandro Noriega-Campero, Alex Rutherford, Oren Lederman +2
Today's age of data holds high potential to enhance the way we pursue and monitor progress in the fields of development and humanitarian action. We study the relation between data…
Targeted Social Mobilisation in a Global Manhunt
Alex Rutherford, Manuel Cebrian, Iyad Rahwan +8
Social mobilization, the ability to mobilize large numbers of people via social networks to achieve highly distributed tasks, has received significant attention in recent times. Th…
Longitudinal Complex Dynamics of Labour Markets Reveal Increasing Polarisation
Shahad Althobaiti, Ahmad Alabdulkareem, Judy Hanwen Shen +4
In this paper we conduct a longitudinal analysis of the structure of labour markets in the US over 7 decades of technological, economic and policy change. We make use of network sc…
Corruption Drives the Emergence of Civil Society
Sherief Abdallah, Rasha Sayed, Iyad Rahwan +4
Peer punishment of free-riders (defectors) is a key mechanism for promoting cooperation in society. However, it is highly unstable since some cooperators may contribute to a common…
The Dynamic Resilience of Urban Labour Networks
Xiangnan Feng, Alex Rutherford
Understanding and potentially predicting or even controlling urban labour markets represents a great challenge for workers and policy makers alike. Cities are effective engines of…
The Network Limits of Infectious Disease Control via Occupation-Based Targeting
Demetris Avraam, Nick Obradovich, Niccoló Pescetelli +2
Policymakers commonly employ non-pharmaceutical interventions to manage the scale and severity of pandemics. Of non-pharmaceutical interventions, social distancing policies -- desi…
Twitter as a Source of Global Mobility Patterns for Social Good
Mark Dredze, Manuel GarcÃa-Herranz, Alex Rutherford +1
Data on human spatial distribution and movement is essential for understanding and analyzing social systems. However existing sources for this data are lacking in various ways; dif…
China's First Workforce Skill Taxonomy
Weipan Xu, Xiaozhen Qin, Xun Li +5
China is the world's second largest economy. After four decades of economic miracles, China's economy is transitioning into an advanced, knowledge-based economy. Yet, we still lack…
Flooding through the lens of mobile phone activity
David Pastor-Escuredo, Alfredo Morales-Guzmán, Yolanda Torres-Fernández +10
Natural disasters affect hundreds of millions of people worldwide every year. Emergency response efforts depend upon the availability of timely information, such as information con…
The International Postal Network and Other Global Flows As Proxies for National Wellbeing
Desislava Hristova, Alex Rutherford, Jose Anson +2
The digital exhaust left by flows of physical and digital commodities provides a rich measure of the nature, strength and significance of relationships between countries in the glo…