On May 27t the SocioPatterns platform was deployed to track and analyze the interactions of people, objects and spaces during a full-scale exercise organized by the CRIMEDIM Research Center in Emergency and Disaster Medicine in collaboration with the Italian Army and a number of other partners, including the ISI Foundation. The exercise involved almost 500 people, a ROLE2+ military field hospital, 2 primary care centers, 8 ambulances and a coordination center. The tracking system featured fully-distributed recording of the interactions between people, ambulances, hospital rooms and equipment, with real-time monitoring of the hospital workflow and live views in the operations center.

We have just published a new paper in BMC Infectious Diseases where we compare different strategies for epidemic mitigation in a primary school and investigate the performance of targeted class-closure interventions.

In the Supplementary Information of the paper, we release a dataset on the face-to-face interactions in a primary school, measured by using wearable proximity sensors. The dataset covers over 200 persons (students and teachers) for about 2 days, and provides not only a complex temporal network, but also the ground truth for communities, i.e., a school class attribute for all nodes in the network. Enjoy!

We have launched a pilot study in collaboration with Laura Ozella and her team at the University of Torino, Italy.  We aim at instrumenting colonies of feral cats in the city of Torino with new proximity sensors programmed by the ISI Data Science Lab to operate in a fully distributed fashion. We will measure the social structure of feral cat colonies in urban settings, and put these data in relation to clinical and microbiological data on cats’ health and transmissible conditions. This pilot study is part of a broader study on animal health and environmental risk factors led by Laura Ozella.

We are thrilled to announce that the long time hardware partners of the SocioPatterns collaboration, Brita Meriac and Milosch Meriac of Bitmanufaktur and OpenBeacon, have open sourced the design of their latest BLE beacons. The new beacons already support the recently announced Physical Web protocol by Google. We look forward to a surging wave of open sociometrics.

We have presented a wealth of new data, analysis and results at the annual European Conference on Complex Systems ECCS’14 that was held in Lucca from Sept. 22 to 26, 2014. Contributed talks were given by A. Barrat, M. Génois, C. Vestergaard and L. Gauvin. R. Mastrandrea also presented preliminary results at the TNETS’14 satellite.
Moreover, A. Barrat and C. Cattuto gave invited talks at the Computational Social Science satellite workshop. Finally, we were glad to see various talks by scientists who used SocioPatterns data sets.