NERDS’ summer sheneanigans continue at ASONAM, in the beautiful and sunny Calabria. Lucio La Cava and Alessia Galdeman held a tutorial on Mining, Modeling, and Analyzing Decentralized Social Media. Alessia Antelmi organized the HyperSci workshop on Theory and Applications of Hypernetwork Science. Luigi Arminio and Daniele De Vinco presented at the PhD Forum. Luca Aiello fulfilled his duties as the conference Program Chair. Luigi won the prize for the best PhD forum contribution!
Claudia Acciai has joined NERDS
We are chuffed to welcome Claudia Acciai to our research group!
Claudia joins us as Postdoc, coming from the Department of Sociology at University of Copenhagen (KU), where she was working on quantifying institutional and country-related Matthew effects in science.
Her work lies at the intersection of comparative public policy, innovation studies and science of science. In her research she combines computational and experimental methods with qualitative content analysis techniques.
At NERDS she joins via the Villum Synergy project Quantifying the Prevalence and Diffusion of Generative AI in Science, supervised by Roberta Sinatra, collaborating closely also with the project’s second PI, Mathias Wullum Nielsen.
CFP Special Issue on Polarization on Social Networks
In collaboration with Prof. Matteo Magnani – InfoLab Uppsala University – some NERDS are editing a special issue of Network Science focusing on Polarization on Social Network.
Read the full call here. The submission deadline is March 31, 2025, but the articles will be processed as soon as submitted. We encourage to send an abstract to the editors by October 31, to receive feedback about suitability of the proposal for the special issue.
Articles will be made available as soon as possible after acceptance, and later included into a special collection when all the submissions to this special issue have been processed.
Reach out if you want to discuss if an idea you have is suitable, otherwise just submit!
Welcome Lasse, the latest NERDS PhD Student!
NERDS keeps growing! This month we’re welcoming Lasse Alsbirk as our latest addition to the team!
Lasse is a co-financed PhD student and at the center of a multi-partnered research project! He will work at the intersection of the Danish Police (financial crimes section), the AI Pioneer Center, and NERDS @ ITU. His project will focus on the application and development of network science tools to fight financial crimes. He has valuable abroad experience, having received his master degree in Israel and he will be with us for four years.
Welcome, Lasse!
Three new NERDS papers with our master students: Failing our youngest, superblockify, women on wikipedia
We have 3 new papers that came out over the summer so far, on diverse, very interesting topics. The first authors in all 3 of these papers were our master students – showing how impactful good master projects can be:
- Failing Our Youngest: On the Biases, Pitfalls, and Risks in a Decision Support Algorithm Used for Child Protection, by T.M. Hansen, R. Sinatra, and V. Sekara, published at FAccT’24
Through a freedom of information request, we accessed a new algorithm of Danish child protection services to aid caseworkers in identifying children at heightened risk of maltreatment, named Decision Support, and conduct an audit. We find that the algorithm has significant methodological flaws, suffers from information leakage, relies on inappropriate proxy values for maltreatment assessment, generates inconsistent risk scores, and exhibits age-based discrimination. Given these serious issues, we strongly advise against the use of this kind of algorithms in local government, municipal, and child protection settings, and we call for rigorous evaluation of such tools before implementation and for continual monitoring post-deployment by listing a series of specific recommendations.
See also our accompanying policy paper published earlier. - superblockify: A Python Package for Automated Generation, Visualization, and Analysis of Potential Superblocks in Cities, by C.M. Büth, A. Vybornova, and M. Szell, published in The Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS)
superblockify is a Python package designed to assist in planning future Superblock implementations by partitioning an urban street network into Superblock-like neighborhoods and providing tools for visualizing and analyzing these partition results. A Superblock is a set of adjacent urban blocks where vehicular through traffic is prevented or pacified, giving priority to people walking and cycling. The potential Superblock blueprints
and descriptive statistics generated by superblockify can be used by urban planners as a first step in a data-driven planning pipeline for future urban transformations, or by urban data scientists as an efficient computational method to evaluate potential Superblock partitions.
The software is available at: superblockify.city - Traces of Unequal Entry Requirement for Illustrious People on Wikipedia Based on their Gender, by L. Krivaa and M. Coscia, published in Advances in Complex Systems
In this paper, we study issues of fair gender representations for people in history noted by multiple language editions of Wikipedia: are women underrepresented on Wikipedia? We do so via a combination of natural language processing and network science. Our results indicate that there is indeed a higher bar for women to have their own biographical page on Wikipedia: women are only included when they have more significant connections than men to the rest of the network. There are visible effects of the initiatives Wikipedia is taking to fix this issue, showing that the gap is narrowing, which validates our interpretation of the data.
Jonas L. Juul has joined NERDS
We are thrilled to welcome Jonas L. Juul to our research group!
Jonas joins us as Assistant Professor, after an illustrious past in network science, having worked -among others- with Mason Porter, Steven Strogatz, Jon Kleinberg, and Sune Lehmann *hashtag namedrop*. He uses statistical methods, mathematical modeling and computer simulations to study social networks, spreading processes and human behavior. Recently, he has been particularly interested in how content spreads between online users, and how to mitigate the spread of diseases in human populations. He approaches these questions both empirically — using methods from modern data science — and theoretically with methods from physics and mathematical modeling.
Jonas had past professional roles at Technical University of Denmark and Cornell University, and he was also part of the Statens Serum Institut’s expert group on mathematical modeling of COVID-19 during the reopening of Denmark in the spring and summer of 2020. Check out Jonas’ cool Webpage to find more information about him.
NERDS at IC2S2’24 in Philly!
A tactical squad of 6 NERDS attended this year’s IC2S2 in Philly, and presented 9 works:
- Anders Giovanni Møller “The Parrot Dilemma: Human-Labeled vs. LLM-augmented Data in Classification Tasks“ (EACL’24)
- Anders Giovanni Møller “The Persuasive Power of Large Language Models“ (ICWSM’24)
- Anders Weile “Uncovering Influence Patterns in Cultural Markets: A Study of Book Lending across Danish Municipalities”
- Arianna Pera “Shifting Climates: Climate Change Communication from YouTube to TikTok“ (WebSci’24)
- Arianna Pera “Narratives of Collective Action in YouTube’s Discourse on Veganism“ (ICWSM’24)
- Arianna Pera “Finding Hidden Swingers in the 2022 Italian Elections Twitter Discourse”
- Arianna Pera “The Storm Within: Hurricanes and Socio-Political Leaning in Climate Change Group Behavior”
- Jacob Aarup Dalsgaard “Toward Fairness in Network Algorithms: Rankings by Biased Random Walks”
- Luigi Arminio “Tracing the sociolinguistic patterns of polarization in the Facebook debate on Climate Action”
We are grateful to the organizers for the great event, and we look forward to IC2S2 coming back to scandinavia in 2025!
New NERDS paper on urban morphology & street network simplification
A new NERDS co-authored paper is out open-access in the Journal of Spatial Information Science (JOSIS): A shape-based heuristic for the detection of urban block artifacts in street networks, by Martin Fleischmann & Anastassia Vybornova.
We propose a cheap computational heuristic for the identification of ‘face artifacts’, i.e., geometries that are enclosed by transportation edges but do not represent urban blocks. Sounds cryptic? Just check out the picture – the artifacts (in red) might be painfully familiar to anyone who has worked with street network data. Our proposed heuristic, implemented open-source in momepy, is the first step towards a fully automated street network simplification workflow. Next steps coming up – stay tuned!
NERDS at ICWSM’24
This week, Arianna and Anders are representing NERDS at ICWSM in Buffalo, NY, with two freshly-published papers.
- Narratives of Collective Action in YouTube’s Discourse on Veganism, by A. Pera and L.M. Aiello. ICWSM’24.
We studied vegan narratives on YouTube through the lens of a theoretical framework of moral narratitves. We studied how different narratives elicit different types of responses from video commenters, and found that videos advocating social activism are the most effective at stirring reactions marked by heightened linguistic markers that relate to collective action. - The Persuasive Power of Large Language Models by A.G. Møller and L.M. Aiello. ICWSM’24.
Can artificial agents interact with each other to reproduce human-like persuasive dialogue? And do the arguments they generate sound persuasive to humans? We used Llama2 to test different persuasion strategies, and asked humans to rate them. We found that arguments that included factual knowledge, markers of trust, expressions of support, and conveyed status were deemed most effective according to both humans and agents.
NERDS at Como Summer School and WebSci’24
Arianna and Anders participated to the first editions of the Computational Social Science Summer School in Como, presenting their work on the COCOONS project. Arianna, Daniele, and external collaborator Maddalena Torricelli also attended the WebSci conference in Stuttgard, presenting an analysis of climate action communication on TikTok [paper], the use of hypergraphs to model opinion dynamics in large-scale social media [poster], and the role of interfaces in shaping human creativity during the interaction with generative AI tools [paper].