[#51] Houses as water: Decoupling geographical constraints from human mobility & Coding Assistants and the use of AI in research

Louis Boucherie
Nov 6, 2025 Seminar
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Driven by access to large volumes of movement data, the study of human mobility has grown rapidly over the past few decades. The field has shown that human mobility is scale-free, proposed models to generate scale-free moving distance distributions and explained how the scale-free distribution arises. It has not, however, explicitly addressed how mobility is structured by geographical constraints, such as how mobility relates to the outlines of landmasses, lakes and rivers and the placement of buildings, roadways and cities. On the basis of millions of moves, we show how separating the effect of geography from mobility choices reveals a power law spanning five orders of magnitude. To do so, we incorporate geography via the pair distribution function, which encapsulates the structure of locations on which mobility occurs. By showing how the spatial distribution of human settlements shapes human mobility, our approach bridges the gap between distance- and opportunity-based models of human mobility.

We will discuss practical use of coding assistants in research, prompt patterns for testable code, workflows using LLMs, Claude code, cursor, copilot, mcp severs etc.

In this seminar, we had the pleasure of hosting Louis Boucherie to explore how geography shapes the structure of human mobility. While mobility research has long shown that people make many short trips and only a few long ones, this work revealed that these patterns cannot be understood without considering the geography of cities.

To do this, he used the pair distribution function, a tool that describes how locations are arranged in space. In simple terms, it tells us how many possible places there are to go at different distances. By comparing the observed movement probability with this pair distribution function, taking their ratio, he showed that it follows a power law across five orders of magnitude. This means that once geography is accounted for, human mobility reveals a simple and universal pattern, bridging distance-based and opportunity-based models of movement.

In our discussion, we also touched on the practical role of coding assistants in research and how these tools help write code, analyse data and influence how we learn and understand our work.

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