What Our Card Payments & Mobile Data Say About How We Live
Webinar
With Thanks To Our Event Sponsor:
Background: The order in which people make purchases can sort a city's residents into distinct lifestyles. Dr Riccardo Di Clemente studies these patterns by combining anonymised credit card transactions with mobile phone data. The lifestyles that emerge differ in how much people spend, how far they travel, where they live and how varied their social circles are. They also divide along familiar lines, including gender and age. That makes the data useful for studying urban inequality, showing how factors such as time of day and urban planning shape social stratification. Banks and mobile networks already hold such records. Used carefully, they can fill gaps in our knowledge of women's economic lives, which conventional data sources struggle to capture. Over longer periods, the same records could show how a recession or rising prices change spending across groups, almost as it happens. Riccardo will discuss what these patterns show about consumer behaviour and urban inequality, and what financial services firms and policymakers can take from them.
Speaker:
Dr Riccardo Di Clemente is an Associate Professor at Northeastern University London, Core Faculty at the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University, Affiliated Faculty in Northeastern's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Affiliated Researcher at the ISI Foundation. He holds a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Physics from Sapienza University of Rome. He received his Ph.D. Europaeus in Economics from IMT Lucca, with a research visit at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the University of Oxford (INET@Oxford), where he applied complex systems tools to economic and social systems. He then held postdoctoral positions at the Institute of Complex Systems in Rome and at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was awarded a Royal Society Newton International Fellowship in applied mathematics, hosted by UCL's Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA). Before joining Northeastern University London, he was a Lecturer in Data Science in the Computer Science Department at the University of Exeter and spent two years as an Alan Turing Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute, developing new data analytics tools for urban dynamics. He was also a Visiting Professor for two years at Sony Computer Science Laboratories Paris, working closely with its Sustainable Cities and Infosphere teams.
Riccardo has consulted for the World Bank and led projects with foundations and NGOs, including the Gates Foundation and Data2X, to develop data-driven solutions for policymaking in developing countries. He is Director of the Complex Connections Lab, a multidisciplinary research group at Northeastern University London and the ISI Foundation. His team develops mathematical frameworks to analyse the complex social connections that govern human behaviour in urban and digital environments, combining network theory, complex systems and machine learning to study the digital footprints people leave in their daily routines. The lab is currently developing models that use digital traces to understand urban segregation and social inequality, examining how spatial and digital divides create patterns of stratification. It also analyses social media conversations to study how major events affect societal interactions, with particular attention to how users' behaviour evolves over time.
Speaker(s):
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Dr Riccardo Di Clemente
Associate Professor at Network Science Institute
Northeastern University London
Chairman:
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Professor Michael Mainelli
Chairman
Z/Yen Group