  Bursty dynamics is a common temporal property of various complex systems in
Nature but it also characterises the dynamics of human actions and
interactions. At the phenomenological level it is a feature of all systems that
evolve heterogeneously over time by alternating between periods of low and high
event frequencies. In such systems, bursts are identified as periods in which
the events occur with a rapid pace within a short time-interval while these
periods are separated by long periods of time with low frequency of events. As
such dynamical patterns occur in a wide range of natural phenomena, their
observation, characterisation, and modelling have been a long standing
challenge in several fields of research. However, due to some recent
developments in communication and data collection techniques it has become
possible to follow digital traces of actions and interactions of humans from
the individual up to the societal level. This led to several new observations
of bursty phenomena in the new but largely unexplored area of human dynamics,
which called for the renaissance to study these systems using research concepts
and methodologies, including data analytics and modelling. As a result, a large
amount of new insight and knowledge as well as innovations have been
accumulated in the field, which provided us a timely opportunity to write this
brief monograph to make an up-to-date review and summary of the observations,
appropriate measures, modelling, and applications of heterogeneous bursty
patterns occurring in the dynamics of human behaviour.
