Jonas Juul wins two grants for maritime-focused network science research

Orient’s Foundation and the Danish Maritime Foundation have decided to fund Jonas Juul’s research with a total amount of DKK 735.000 (€100,000.)

In the 18-month project, Jonas Juul will study the dynamics of growing and changing networks, developing new statistical tools to quantify how networks grow. The project will be conducted in coordination with the major Danish shipping company NORDEN.

We are excited that the maritime industry and maritime foundations have decided to board our network science journey.

Congratulations to you Jonas. We wish you fair winds and smooth sailing for the work ahead.

An AI-generated network of ships! (Created with Microsoft Copilot)

PhD and Postdoc call: Using data science to improve epidemic preparedness

We are looking for PhDs and Postdocs to join Jonas Juul improving inference, forecasting, and mitigation in future pandemics.

The project (funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation) will improve epidemic preparedness in several ways, for example:

By improving the statistical foundation for the projection of epidemic case numbers.
By quantifying the effectiveness and efficiency of mitigation strategies analytically and numerically, we will get a better understanding of how mitigation strategies should adapt as an epidemic develops.
By studying plausible infection patterns in combination with Danish register data to understand how the COVID-19 epidemic propagated through Danish social networks.

The positions come with attractive opportunities for conference participation, travel, etc., and Copenhagen offers a world-class research community in network science, epidemiology, and data science.

Interested in large-scale data analysis, applied statistics, and/or analytical methods for studying epidemics in networks? Read more here:

and feel free to reach out to Jonas Juul (jjuu@itu.dk) if you have any questions.

Arianna Pera defends her PhD: The Language of Collective Action in the Social Web

Big congratulations to Arianna for successfully defending her PhD thesis on the role of language in fostering grassroots collective action. The Committee was composed by Luca Rossi, Fabiana Zollo, and Sune Lehmann. Her very proud supervisor is Luca Aiello.

Collage with three pictures 1) Arianna presenting her work, 2) Arianna posing with members of the Committee (Luca Rossi, Sune Lehmann) and with her advisor (Luca Aiello) 3) Arianna and many NERDS nighttime celegration

During her three years with NERDS, Arianna has published 7 paper in the areas of mobilization framing, computational narratives, and applied NLP. She has become a very active member of the international Computational Social Science community, which will benefit from her work for many years to come.

On March 1st she will start a research position at SODAS with Clara Vandeweerdt.

In bocca al lupo, Arianna!

Luigi defends his PhD: Polarisation in an Evolving Social Media Landscape

Big congratulations to Dr. Luigi Arminio. Yesterday he defended his thesis on Polarisation in an Evolving Social Media Landscape: Multimodal Insights from the Climate Debate.

Supervisor: Luca Rossi
Committee: Luca Aiello, Cornelius Puschmann, Cindy Shen

We are extremely happy and proud of Luigi’s research dealing with the crucial issue of online polarisation and producing both substantial contribution as well as methodological advancements.

Luigi’s work is built on 6 papers and investigated both textual and visual data. On the textual side he showed how opposite groups in a polarised debate are recognisable by specific socio-linguistic feature that we can detect computationally. On the visual side he contributed to the development of a research pipeline that leverages Visual Large Language Models to produce semantic clustering of visual content. This was then used to study the ongoing visual narratives surrounding the climate debate.

On March 1st Luigi will start a research position at Roskilde University in the context of the Algorithms, Data & Democracy project but we know that our collaboration isn’t over.

Jacob Liam Curran-Sebastian has joined NERDS

Jacob joins us as a new postdoc, bringing degrees in mathematics and extensive experience with data‑driven modeling of epidemics.

He will work with Jonas L. Juul and Morten Boilesen on the InForM project (funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation), using data from Statistics Denmark and Statens Serum Institut to study how COVID‑19 spread in Denmark. Jacob already knows his way around the data and we are super excited to have him with us. Welcome, Jacob!

Manuel Knepper has joined NERDS

We welcome our latest NERDS member: Manuel Knepper.

Manuel, who is already guest at NERDS since a few months, joins now as a research assistant for one year, after having finished a master in data science here at ITU with Michele and Anastassia on predicting cyclist flows with machine learning methods.

Manuel will work with Michael and Anastassia on the recently won InnoExplorer grant as research software engineer to turn raw bicycle network algorithms into packaged Python software usable for urban planners, helping us close the gap between research and policy/application. Manuel’s background, his thesis, and also his industry experience with data and software engineering makes him a perfect fit for this role. Besides, Manuel will also be teaching assistant for the geospatial data science course in spring.

We are excited to have you with us, Manuel. Welcome!

Identity improvements to NERDS

Happy new year! 🎉
We have two cosmetic updates to announce, part of a broader move for an improved identity and strategy.

First, we shall hencefort be called Networks, Data, and Society (NERDS) instead of the old NEtwoRks, Data, and Society (NERDS). It is a tiny simplification at Hamming-distance 2 🤓 that eases writing our group name. AlSo LoOkS mUcH BeTtEr!

Second, we have rearranged group members on our people page into permanent members (PermaNERDS) and long-time members (LongoNERDS). This was done so we could add the following text:

At NERDS we do not have one boss for good reasons. Instead, leadership is distributed among all permanent members, in exchange with non-permanent members. We have one rotating group representative / contact person, marked below with a star *.

This shared leadership has always been the case at NERDS, so nothing has changed. It was just not clear previously from the website and could have lead to confusion because most other research groups in academia follow the classical one-PI-on-top-all-the-rest-below model. Internationally, given our size, structure, and impact, it would be more appropriate to call NERDS a research “center”, “institute”, or “collective”, but for historical reasons at ITU we are considered a “group”.

These updates are the outcome of a recent NERDS faculty meeting, where we also set out to implement more social/teambuilding events to strengthen even more our already high commitment to wellbeing, and to improve steering processes towards clarifying our long-term strategies and visions.

Finally, as ITU is in the process of finding a new webhosting solution for research group web pages, we might see bigger, but probably also just stylistic, updates to our website later this year.

We wish you a fulfilling 2026! 🖖

Michael, Anastassia and Manuel win Innoexplorer Grant!

Michael Szell, Anastassia Vybornova, and Manuel Knepper have won a 1-year “Innoexplorer” grant by the Innovation Fund Denmark, of DKK 1.4 million (~EUR 188,000), for a project to turn raw bicycle network algorithms into polished software. Congratulations to the team of Michael, Manuel and Anastassia! 🥳

The project Bicycle network planning for a greener future made in Denmark: From network growth algorithms to user-friendly planning software has two goals: 1) take existing algorithms from our bicycle network research that we developed in the past years, and turn them into software that is usable by urban planners, 2) visualize the solutions on a web platform to guide urban planners on their usage. Innoexplorer in general aims to close the gap between research and policy with targeted short-term funding, to arrive at commercially viability. This easy applicability is also exactly what our bicycle network research was lacking so far.

The project will hire 2 people for one year: A research software engineer, and a web developer. We are already in the process of hiring our existing visitor Manuel Knepper for the first position, to start from January 2026. The web developer is planned to start from March 2026. Further, the project will be supported by Anastassia Vybornova, who has herself developed several of the algorithms, and by two external urbanism / visualization experts. We hope that the Innovation Fund’s support will ultimately enable more people to enjoy the benefits of cycling!

Vedran wins Independent Research Fund Denmark Grant!

As reported on ITU’s frontpage, Vedran Sekara has just won an Independent Research Fund Denmark grant (a “DFF 1”) of DKK 3.1 million (~EUR 415,000) for a project to understand how climate change affects our collective behaviour – especially our movement patterns. Congratulations Vedran for this “big catch”! 🥳

The project ClimateAdapt will work with large volumes of anonymised GPS data from countries like the US and countries in Europe. These datasets reveal how millions of people move through their daily lives – working, shopping, doing social activities. By matching these movement patterns with local climate events such as heatwaves, cloudbursts, and changing humidity levels, Vedran and his team aim to map out how behaviour changes. Read more in the ITU news.

Vedran’s ClimateAdapt project will soon open calls for PhDs/Postdocs.. stay tuned!

Two new NERDS papers: Algorithmic bias, street network simplification

We have two new publications out!

Detecting bias in algorithms used to disseminate information in social networks and mitigating it using multiobjective optimization, by Vedran Sekara, Ivan Dotu, Manuel Cebrian, Esteban Moro, Manuel Garcia−Herranz published in PNAS Nexus

Based on extensive computer simulations on synthetic and 10 diverse real-world social networks we show that seeding information in social networks using state-of-the-art influence maximization methods creates information gaps. Our results show that these algorithms select influencers who do not disseminate information equitably, threatening to create an increasingly unequal society. To overcome this issue, we devise a multiobjective algorithm which both maximizes influence and information equity. Our results demonstrate it is possible to reduce vulnerability at a relatively low trade-off with respect to spread. This highlights that in our search for maximizing the spread of information we do not need to compromise on information equality.
Adaptive continuity-preserving simplification of street networks, by Martin Fleischmann, Anastassia Vybornova, James D. Gaboardi, Anna Brázdová, Daniela Dančejová, published in Computers, Environment and Urban Systems

Street network data is widely used to study human-based activities and urban structure. Often, these data are geared towards transportation applications, which require highly granular, directed graphs that capture the complex relationships of potential traffic patterns. While this level of network detail is critical for certain fine-grained mobility models, it represents a hindrance for studies concerned with the morphology of the street network. For the latter case, street network simplification — the process of converting a highly granular input network into its most simple morphological form — is a necessary, but highly tedious preprocessing step, especially when conducted manually. In this manuscript, we develop and present a novel adaptive algorithm for simplifying street networks that is both fully automated and able to mimic results obtained through a manual simplification routine. The algorithm — available in the neatnet Python package — outperforms current state-of-the-art procedures when comparing those methods to manually, human-simplified data, while preserving network continuity.
See also the neatnet package: https://github.com/uscuni/neatnet