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Social networks are all the rage. Of course, people were in social networks before the advent of MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Orkut etc. Real life social networks have been the object of many studies by social scientists, looking at anything from school ties and retirement, to judo clubs and wealth creation. Social science traditionally invovles "heavy lifting" in terms of gathering empirical data through observation, questionannaire and so forth. In recent work, we (and other researchers) have measured human mobility and co-location more directly. We realise that mining this data, alongside online-social networks where people "self-declare" their relationships and interests, and combining this with analysis of communication patterns, can yield rich results that 1. give us deeper understanding of human society 2. allow us to build better infrastructures for communication 3. may better match technology for online versus real social life.




