| When it comes to visitation patterns, humans beings are extremely regular and predictable, with recurrent activities responsible for most of our movements. In recent years, we have seen scientists attempt to model and explain human dynamics and in particular human movement. Akin to other human behaviors, traveling patterns evolve from the convolution between internal and external factors. A better understanding on the mechanisms responsible for transforming and incorporating individual events into regular patterns is of fundamental importance. Many aspects of our complex lives are affected by human movements such as disease spread and epidemics modeling, city planning, wireless network development, and disaster relief, to name a few. Given the myriad of applications, it is clear that a complete understanding of how people move in space can lead to considerable benefits to our society. In most of the recent works, scientists have focused on the idea that people movements are biased towards frequently-visited locations. According to them, human movement is based on a exploration/exploitation dichotomy in which individuals choose new locations (exploration) or return to frequently-visited locations (exploitation). In this dissertation we present some of our contributions to the field, such as the presence of a recency effect in human mobility and Web browsing behaviors as well as the Returner vs. Explorers dichotomy in Web browsing trajectories. |
