EPJ Data Science Highlight - Women’s disadvantage: because of who they are, or what they do?

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Published on 02 August 2019

Women often find themselves strongly disadvantaged in the field of software development, in particular when it comes to open source. In a study recently published in EPJ Data Science, Orsolya Vasarhelyi and Balazs argue that this disadvantage stems from gendered behavior rather than categorical discrimination: women are at a disadvantage because of what they do, rather than because of who they are.

Continue reading the guest post by Orsolya Vasarhelyi and Balazs Vedres on the SpringerOpen blog.

EPJ Data Science Highlight - What ‘Twitch Plays Pokémon’ tells us about crowd behavior

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Published on 05 July 2019

No one would deny that the behavior of the people we know, and even of our own, can radically change depending on those who surround us. The problem of understanding how being in a group changes the way we behave has been subject of intense research in psychology since the beginning of the past century. The beginning of the XXI century gave rise to a new kind of group: the online crowds. Nowadays, it is no longer necessary to have all individuals in the same place in order to have a ‘crowd’. What is more, it is possible to connect together thousands, even millions, of individuals in a matter of minutes.

In the work recently published in EPJ Data Science, we study one such occasion that gathered millions of users: Twitch Plays Pokémon.

Continue reading the guest post by Alberto Aleta on the SpringerOpen blog.

EPJ Data Science Highlight - What can we learn from billions of food purchases derived from fidelity cards?

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Published on 23 May 2019

For your health, what you eat is more important than what you earn.

This result comes from our latest project “Poor but Healthy”, which was published in EPJ Data Science, and comes with a @tobi_vierzwo’s stunningly “beautiful map of London” that author Daniele Quercia invites everyone to explore.

By combining 1.6B food item purchases with 1.1B medical prescriptions for the entire city of London for one year, researchers discovered that, to predict health outcomes, socio-economic conditions matter less than what previous research has shown: despite being of lower-income, certain areas are healthy, and that is because of what their residents eat.

Read the full blog post on Medium.