"The ramifications are extremely important because if we assume that people are moving randomly, we are wrong and, therefore, we will not be prepared for what people actually do," said Boleslaw Szymanski, director of SCNARC and professor of computer science at Rensselaer.
"Where you live really matters: Most of your friends are concentrated in the place where you live, and as the distance increases, this concentration rapidly drops," added Szymanski, reported the Proceedings of the 2012 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining.
