Monthly Archives: November 2021

Establishing the Nightingale Network

Together with Sune Lehmann and Laura Alessandretti from SODAS/DTU we are establishing the Nightingale Network: The Nightingale Network brings together faculty, postdocs, and students based in Denmark who share an interest in Computational Social Science, Complex Systems, and Network Science.

More info and subscribe here: https://www.socialdatascience.dk/nightingale

We aim to strengthen the Denmark-based data and network science community, and send out a monthly newsletter listing relevant events, news, and job postings in Denmark and beyond. Please also share your tips, calls, and job postings!

We will also organize regular gatherings. The first event was the first Nightingale Network Night which happened last week at ITU, and which successfully established and strengthened many social and culinary connections, from Scaccia to Borek and Apfelstrudel:

We will also share the nerdy party games we created on our github page so that others can replicate the fun! https://github.com/NERDSITU/nerdyicebreakers

Sign up to our news, and see you soon (modulo lockdown)!

A dream come true for Luca Aiello 🖖

Our very own Luca Aiello was interviewed by none other than William “Captain Kirk” Shatner on his recent dreams research, in Shatner’s show “I Don’t Understand”:

https://www.rt.com/shows/i-don-t-understand-with-william-shatner/532878-dream-analysis-social-science/

Watch the 26 minute interview to see Luca baffling and exciting Shatner by answering his burning questions, such as:

What in heaven’s name is computational science doing with dreams?

What methodology did you use to give us an algorithm about dreams?

Say you meant to say “maybe” and you said “baby”, one would have said prior to your science “That was a Freudian slip” – you don’t work that way?

It could be Hitler all over again?

Could you understand why an individual does not take a vaccine?

No doubt this interview was a NERDS dream come true! 🖖

Two new NERDS papers: NFT market and Pearson correlations on networks

Two new papers from the NERDS crew!

    1. Mapping the NFT revolution: market trends, trade networks, and visual features, by M. Nadini, L. Alessandretti, F. Di Giacinto, M. Martino, L.M. Aiello, A. Baronchelli, published in Scientific Reports

      Luca and collaborators performed the first large-scale analysis of the market of Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) since its birth. The looked at 6.1 million trades of 4.7 million NFTs to learn about market, traders, visual features and price prediction. The dataset they collected is available. Learn more on this blogpost from the Alan Turing Institute.
      Also, watch the accompanying video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyIITtPKJbY
    2. Pearson correlations on complex networks, by M. Coscia, published in Journal of Complex Networks
       

       
      Estimating the correlation between two processes happening on the same network is therefore an important problem with a number of applications. However, at present there is no way to do so: current methods to estimate the correlation between two processes happening on the same network either correlate a network with itself, a single process with the network structure, or calculate a network distance between two processes. To fill this gap, Michele created a new method to extend the Pearson correlation coefficient to work on complex networks, and showed its usefulness in tasks related to social network analysis and economics. Learn more on this blogpost.

Sandro Sousa has joined NERDS

We are delighted to welcome Sandro Sousa to our research group!

Sandro joins us as Postdoc coming from Queen Mary University of London. He recently completed his PhD in Complex Systems, on quantifying the heterogeneity of spatial systems through random walks on graphs with a particular interest on urban segregation.

Due to his Brazilian origins, before that he had worked on projects focusing on São Paulo, for example on social segregation, transport accessibility, or graph-based approaches to quantify topological changes in Sao Paulo’s public transport network at different spatial scales. Before his research career, he worked on IT consulting and data solutions for more than 7 years. Find more info about Sandro on his stylish webpage: https://sandrofsousa.github.io

He is hired through our recently won VILLUM project, at NERDS he will therefore be focusing on topics of Science of Science and success together with Roberta Sinatra, including algorithmic fairness in research.