Communities, boundaries and symmetries - Hidden structures in multi-scale human mobilty networks

Geographical boundaries are key determinants of various spatially extended dynamical phenomena. Examples are migration dynamics of species, the spread of infectious diseases, bioinvasive processes, and the spatial evolution of language. I will give an overview of a set of research projects that address the organizational units encoded in multi-scale human mobility networks. I will show how these networks can be employed to introduce, define and quantify large scale communities and their boundaries that only partially coincide with administrative and political ones. I will show how common modularity measures can be used to identify these structures and will discuss an alternative approach based on a new notion of distance in human mobility. I will conclude with a discussion of the discovery of novel symmetries in multi-scale mobility networks an point out a new coordinate system for representing complex mobility networks.