Migrants' assimilation is a major challenge for European societies, in part because of the sudden surge of refugees in recent years and in part because of long-term demographic trends. In this paper, we use Facebook's data for advertisers to study the levels of assimilation of Arabic-speaking migrants in Germany, as seen through the interests they express online. Our results indicate a gradient of assimilation along demographic lines, language spoken and country of origin. Given the difficulty to collect timely migration data, in particular for traits related to cultural assimilation, the methods that we develop and the results that we provide open new lines of research that computational social scientists are well-positioned to address.
New information, like Web and social media data, are a main source of innovation in the context of migration studies. Research in this area has focused on using online data to improve estimates of migration flows and stocks. After Zagheni and Weber used geo-located Yahoo! e-mail data to estimate international migration flows @cite_12 , several platforms have been used to understand the network structure of migration, including Facebook @cite_3 and Google+ @cite_1 . Geo-located Twitter data has proved useful for studying the relationship between internal and international migration @cite_2 , as well as short-term mobility versus long-term migration @cite_9 @cite_4 . LinkedIn data has provided insights into global patterns of migration for professionals @cite_10 .
@cite_4 @cite_9 @cite_1 @cite_3 @cite_2 @cite_10 @cite_12
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Migration estimates are sensitive to definitions of time interval and duration. For example, when does a tourist become a migrant? As a result, harmonizing across different kinds of estimates or data sources can be difficult. Moreover in countries like the United States, that do not have a national registry system, estimates of internal migration typically rely on survey data that can require over a year from data collection to publication. In addition, each survey can ask only a limited set questions about migration (e.g., where did you live a year ago? where did you live five years ago?). We leverage a sample of geo-referenced Twitter tweets for about 62,000 users, spanning the period between 2010 and 2016, to estimate a series of US internal migration flows under varying time intervals and durations. Our findings, expressed in terms of 'migration curves', document, for the first time, the relationships between short-term mobility and long-term migration. The results open new avenues for demographic research. More specifically, future directions include the use of migration curves to produce probabilistic estimates of long-term migration from short-term (and vice versa) and to nowcast mobility rates at different levels of spatial and temporal granularity using a combination of previously published American Community Survey data and up-to-date data from a panel of Twitter users. Data about migration flows are largely inconsistent across countries, typically outdated, and often inexistent. Despite the importance of migration as a driver of demographic change, there is limited availability of migration statistics. Generally, researchers rely on census data to indirectly estimate flows. However, little can be inferred for specific years between censuses and for recent trends. The increasing availability of geolocated data from online sources has opened up new opportunities to track recent trends in migration patterns and to improve our understanding of the relationships between internal and international migration. In this paper, we use geolocated data for about 500,000 users of the social network website "Twitter". The data are for users in OECD countries during the period May 2011- April 2013. We evaluated, for the subsample of users who have posted geolocated tweets regularly, the geographic movements within and between countries for independent periods of four months, respectively. Since Twitter users are not representative of the OECD population, we cannot infer migration rates at a single point in time. However, we proposed a difference-in-differences approach to reduce selection bias when we infer trends in out-migration rates for single countries. Our results indicate that our approach is relevant to address two longstanding questions in the migration literature. First, our methods can be used to predict turning points in migration trends, which are particularly relevant for migration forecasting. Second, geolocated Twitter data can substantially improve our understanding of the relationships between internal and international migration. Our analysis reli Recently, there have been considerable efforts to use online data to investigate international migration. These efforts show that Web data are valuable for estimating migration rates and are relatively easy to obtain. However, existing studies have only investigated flows of people along migration corridors, i.e. between pairs of countries. In our work, we use data about "places lived" from millions of Google+ users in order to study migration "clusters", i.e. groups of countries in which individuals have lived. For the first time, we consider information about more than two countries people have lived in. We argue that these data are very valuable because this type of information is not available in traditional demographic sources which record country-to-country migration flows independent of each other. We show that migration clusters of country triads cannot be identified using information about bilateral flows alone. To demonstrate the additional insights that can be gained by using data about migration clusters, we first develop a model that tries to predict the prevalence of a given triad using only data about its constituent pairs. We then inspect the groups of three countries which are more or less prominent, compared to what we would expect based on bilateral flows alone. Next, we identify a set of features such as a shared language or colonial ties that explain which triple of country pairs are more or less likely to be clustered when looking at country triples. Then we select and contrast a few cases of clusters that provide some qualitative information about what our data set shows. The type of data that we use is potentially available for a number of social media services. International migration is one of the major determinants of demographic change. Although efforts to produce comparable statistics are underway, estimates of demographic flows are inexistent, outdated, or largely inconsistent, for most countries. We estimate age and gender-specific migration rates using data extracted from a large sample of Yahoo! e-mail messages. Self-reported age and gender of anonymized e-mail users were linked to the geographic locations (mapped from IP addresses) from where users sent e-mail messages over time (2009-2011). The users' country of residence over time was inferred as the one from where most e-mail messages were sent. Our estimates of age profiles of migration are qualitatively consistent with existing administrative data sources. Selection bias generates uncertainty for estimates at one point in time, especially for developing countries. However, our approach allows us to compare in a reliable way migration trends of females and males. We document the recent increase in human mobility and we observe that female mobility has been increasing at a faster pace. Our findings suggest that e-mail data may complement existing migration data, resolve inconsistencies arising from different definitions of migration, and provide new and rich information on mobility patterns and social networks of migrants. The use of digital records for demographic research has the potential to become particularly important for developing countries, where the diffusion of Internet will be faster than the development of mature demographic registration systems. We investigate trends in the international migration of professional workers by analyzing a dataset of millions of geolocated career histories provided by LinkedIn, the largest online platform for professionals. The new dataset confirms that the United States is, in absolute terms, the top destination for international migrants. However, we observe a decrease, from 2000 to 2012, in the percentage of professional migrants, worldwide, who have the United States as their country of destination. The pattern holds for persons with Bachelors, Masters, and PhD degrees alike, and for individuals with degrees from highly-ranked worldwide universities. Our analysis also reveals the growth of Asia as a major professional migration destination during the past twelve years. Although we see a decline in the share of employment-based migrants going to the United States, our results show a recent rebound in the percentage of international students who choose the United States as their destination. The incredible growth of the social web over the last decade has ushered in a flurry of new social media sites. On one hand, users have an inordinate number of choices; on the other hand, users are constrained by limited time and resources and have to choose sites in order to remain social and active. Hence, dynamic social media entails user migration, a well studied phenomenon in fields such as sociology and psychology. Users are valuable assets for social media sites as they help contribute to the growth of a site and generate revenue by increased traffic. We are intrigued to know if social media user migration can be studied, and what migration patterns are. In particular, we investigate whether people migrate, and if they do, how they migrate. We formalize site and attention migration to help identify the migration between popular social media sites and determine clear patterns of migration between sites. This work suggests a feasible way to study migration patterns in social media. The discovered patterns can help understand social media sites and gauge their popularity to improve business intelligence and revenue generation through the retention of users. Citation relationship between scientific publications has been successfully used for scholarly bibliometrics, information retrieval and data mining tasks, and citation-based recommendation algorithms are well documented. While previous studies investigated citation relations from various viewpoints, most of them share the same assumption that, if paper1 cites paper2 (or author1 cites author2), they are connected, regardless of citation importance, sentiment, reason, topic, or motivation. However, this assumption is oversimplified. In this study, we employ an innovative "context-rich heterogeneous network" approach, which paves a new way for citation recommendation task. In the network, we characterize 1) the importance of citation relationships between citing and cited papers, and 2) the topical citation motivation. Unlike earlier studies, the citation information, in this paper, is characterized by citation textual contexts extracted from the full-text citing paper. We also propose algorithm to cope with the situation when large portion of full-text missing information exists in the bibliographic repository. Evaluation results show that, context-rich heterogeneous network can significantly enhance the citation recommendation performance.