Title: Sensing human behaviour with online data

Abstract: Our everyday usage of the Internet leaves volumes of data in its wake. Can we use this data to help us reduce delays and costs in measuring human behaviour, or even to measure behaviour we couldn’t measure before? Here, we will outline a number of studies carried out at the Data Science Lab at Warwick Business School, investigating whether online data can help us monitor disease levels, measure global travel patterns, and evaluate whether the beauty of the environment we live in might affect our health. We will discuss some of the challenges in generating estimates of human behaviour from online data when our relationship with Internet services continues to evolve at such rapid pace.

Speakers:

• Suzy Moat is an Associate Professor of Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School, where she co-directs the Data Science Lab. She is also a Faculty Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute. Her research investigates whether data on our usage of the Internet, from sources such as Google, Wikipedia and Flickr, can help us measure and even predict human behaviour in the real world.
• Tobias Preis is a Professor of Behavioural Science and Finance at the University of Warwick and a Faculty Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute.