# Sensing and Modeling Human Behavior Using Social Media and Mobile Data

## TL;DR

This paper explores how social media and mobile data enable large-scale, detailed analysis of human behavior, advancing computational social science by validating and developing behavioral models.

## Contribution

It highlights the role of digital traces from social media and smartphones in passive data collection for modeling human behavior and testing social science theories.

## Key findings

- Digital traces enable large-scale behavioral analysis
- Data supports validation of social science theories
- New models of human behavior can be developed from digital data

## Abstract

In the past years we have witnessed the emergence of the new discipline of computational social science, which promotes a new data-driven and computation-based approach to social sciences. In this article we discuss how the availability of new technologies such as online social media and mobile smartphones has allowed researchers to passively collect human behavioral data at a scale and a level of granularity that were just unthinkable some years ago. We also discuss how these digital traces can then be used to prove (or disprove) existing theories and develop new models of human behavior.