Earthquakes, lab-quakes, and a seismology perspective on bursty human dynamics

It has been shown in recent years that there are deep analogies between some well-known
statistical properties of earthquakes (km-scale phenomena), such as the Gutenberg-Richter, the
Omori, and the productivity laws, and the avalanche statistics observed in fracture and plasticity in
materials science (”lab-quakes”, mm- and micron- scale phenomena). Similar statistical regularities
have also been observed in the bursty behavior of financial markets. I will report on current work
which extends this perspective also to the analysis of bursty human dynamics, specifically of long-
term written communication (email) data. In these, we observe scaling regularities strikingly similar
to the above-mentioned ones in earthquakes and lab-quakes, a possible indication of universal
features exhibited by the dynamics of complex systems heterogeneous in space and time.

Contatto: anna.scotti@polimi.it