Today I read a paper titled “Interplay between telecommunications and face-to-face interactions – a study using mobile phone data”
The abstract is:
In this study we analyze one year of anonymized telecommunications data for over one million customers from a large European cellphone operator, and we investigate the relationship between people’s calls and their physical location
We discover that more than 90% of users who have called each other have also shared the same space (cell tower), even if they live far apart
Moreover, we find that close to 70% of users who call each other frequently (at least once per month on average) have shared the same space at the same time – an instance that we call co-location
Co-locations appear indicative of coordination calls, which occur just before face-to-face meetings
Their number is highly predictable based on the amount of calls between two users and the distance between their home locations – suggesting a new way to quantify the interplay between telecommunications and face-to-face interactions