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The Growth Lab's Research Seminar series is a weekly seminar that brings together researchers from across the academic spectrum who share an interest in growth and development.
Speaker: Dakota Murray, Research Assistant Professor, Northeastern University
Location: HYBRID / Zoom
Whether attending in person or virtually, please register in advance.
Paper Abstract:
Human migration and mobility drives major societal phenomena including epidemics, economies, innovation, and the diffusion of ideas. Although human mobility and migration have been heavily constrained by geographic distance throughout the history, advances, and globalization are making other factors such as language and culture increasingly more important. Advances in neural embedding models, originally designed for natural language, provide an opportunity to tame this complexity and open new avenues for the study of migration. Here, we demonstrate the ability of the model word2vec to encode nuanced relationships between discrete locations from migration trajectories, producing an accurate, dense, continuous, and meaningful vector-space representation. The resulting representation provides a functional distance between locations, as well as a “digital double” that can be distributed, re-used, and itself interrogated to understand the many dimensions of migration. We show that the unique power of word2vec to encode migration patterns stems from its mathematical equivalence with the gravity model of mobility. Focusing on the case of scientific migration, we apply word2vec to a database of three million migration trajectories of scientists derived from the affiliations listed on their publication records. Using techniques that leverage its semantic structure, we demonstrate that embeddings can learn the rich structure that underpins scientific migration, such as cultural, linguistic, and prestige relationships at multiple levels of granularity. Our results provide a theoretical foundation and methodological framework for using neural embeddings to represent and understand migration both within and beyond science.
About the Speaker:
Dakota Murray is a research assistant professor at the Network Science Institute at Northeastern Univeristy. Previously, he worked as a Data Scientist with Digital Science to develop tools and deliver analysis to support decision making in funding agencies. He was also a postdoctoral research associate working at the Center for Complex Network Research with Albert-László Barabási. He received a Ph.D in Informatics at Indiana University Bloomington.