Languages are grouped into families that share common linguistic traits. While this approach has been successful in understanding genetic relations between diverse languages, more analyses are needed to accurately quantify their relatedness, especially in less studied linguistic levels such as syntax. Here, we explore linguistic distances using series of parts of speech (POS) extracted from the Universal Dependencies dataset. Within an information-theoretic framework, we show that employing POS trigrams maximizes the possibility of capturing syntactic variations while being at the same time compatible with the amount of available data. Linguistic connections are then established by assessing pairwise distances based on the POS distributions. Intriguingly, our analysis reveals definite clusters that correspond to well known language families and groups, with exceptions explained by distinct morphological typologies. Furthermore, we obtain a significant correlation between language similarity and geographic distance, which underscores the influence of spatial proximity on language kinships.

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.

International collaboration has become imperative in the field of AI. However, few studies exist concerning how distance factors have affected the international collaboration in AI research. In this study, we investigate this problem by using 1,294,644 AI related collaborative papers harvested from the Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) dataset. A framework including 13 indicators to quantify the distance factors between countries from 5 perspectives (i.e., geographic distance, economic distance, cultural distance, academic distance, and industrial distance) is proposed. The relationships were conducted by the methods of descriptive analysis and regression analysis. The results show that international collaboration in the field of AI today is not prevalent (only 15.7%). All the separations in international collaborations have increased over years, except for the cultural distance in masculinity/felinity dimension and the industrial distance. The geographic distance, economic distance and academic distances have shown significantly negative relationships with the degree of international collaborations in the field of AI. The industrial distance has a significant positive relationship with the degree of international collaboration in the field of AI. Also, the results demonstrate that the participation of the United States and China have promoted the international collaboration in the field of AI. This study provides a comprehensive understanding of internationalizing AI research in geographic, economic, cultural, academic, and industrial aspects.

We obtained 1,584,175 AI related publications during 1950-2019 from the Microsoft Academic Graph. Three latitude-and-longitude-based indicators were employed to quantify the geographic distance of collaborations in AI over time at domestic and international levels. The results show team collaborations in AI has been more popular in the field over time with around 42,000 (38.4%) multiple-affiliation AI publications in 2019. The changes in geographic distances of team collaborations indicate the increase of breadth and density for both domestic and international collaborations in AI over time. In addition, the United States produced the largest number of single-country and internationally collaborated AI publications, and China has played an important role in international collaborations in AI after 2010.

The popularity of the Web has allowed individuals to communicate and interact with each other on a global scale: people connect both to close friends and acquaintances, creating ties that can bridge otherwise separated groups of people. Recent evidence suggests that spatial distance is still affecting social links established on online platforms, with online ties preferentially connecting closer people. In this work we study the relationships between interaction strength, spatial distance and structural position of ties between members of a large-scale online social networking platform, Tuenti. We discover that ties in highly connected social groups tend to span shorter distances than connections bridging together otherwise separated portions of the network. We also find that such bridging connections have lower social interaction levels than ties within the inner core of the network and ties connecting to its periphery. Our results suggest that spatial constraints on online social networks are intimately connected to structural network properties, with important consequences for information diffusion.

The spatial structure of large-scale online social networks has been largely unaccessible due to the lack of available and accurate data about people’s location. However, with the recent surging popularity of location-based social services, data about the geographic position of users have been available for the first time, together with their online social connections. In this work we present a comprehensive study of the spatial properties of the social networks arising among users of three main popular online location-based services. We observe robust universal features across them: while all networks exhibit about 40% of links below 100 km, we further discover strong heterogeneity across users, with different characteristic spatial lengths of interaction across both their social ties and social triads. We provide evidence that mechanisms akin to gravity models may influence how these social connections are created over space. Our results constitute the first large-scale study to unravel the socio-spatial properties of online location-based social networks.