As research gets more and more global [1,2] new countries and institutions are getting involved in the research activities around the world. There is an increasing need of understanding these complex mobility patterns.

Researchers form a distributed open network around the world. In this project we would like to study the untapped opportunity of the network of scientists traveling around the globe. This could help us to understand how we are doing research and how we could contribute to local communities.

The example of the project, where such analysis could be applied, is „Lecturers without borders" [2], project for scientists and educators, who use their travel opportunities and connect to local educational projects and local communities. There are various projects, which could benefit from the study (e.g. ecological or science communication ones).

1. A. Mannocci et al. http://oro.open.ac.uk/id/eprint/54310 (2018)

2. L.Tupikina, D. Zemp et  al. NetSci Proceed. (2018)

Many processes in our world can be encoded into random walk models. 

One can ask "What is the probability that two friends in one city meet each other if they do not have phones as it is shown in the figure below".

One can consider this problem from two perspectives of random walks analysis:

1. random walks in continuous space 

2. random walks in discrete space (on a graph)

What is the probability that 2 drifters do not meet or meet? 

For making 1->2 we can scrap the osm data and put this on a graph using this notebook: https://github.com/lecturers-without-borders/geo_data_analysis/blob/master/get_schools_from_locations.ipynb