Category Archives: Accolade

Roundup of NERDS at IC2S2

This year’s IC2S2, the 9th International Conference on Computational Social Science is now over, and it was a smashing success! The conference brought together over 700 people from dozens of countries, doubling in size compared to the previous edition. With 50% PhD and 30% Postdoc participants, the Computational Social Science community is young and refreshingly open, which could also be seen from the diversity of keynote speakers, spanning from evolutionary biologists to tourism/transport researchers. This community is the opposite of calcified – rather, it brought together experts and ideas from different fields for a true, unpolitical exchange and cross-pollination. This is how science should be done.

We fully echo the sentiments of the president of the new International Society for Computational Social Science (ISCSS), Duncan Watts, who concluded in the IC2S2 town hall meeting: We don’t have clear boundaries. Whoever identifies as computational social scientist should come to IC2S2.

NERDS played a significant role at IC2S2. We co-organized the conference, chaired several sessions, held a successful tutorial, and gave 2 lightning talks, 7 parallel talks, and presented 13 posters. See the full list of our activities here: NERDSIC2S2.PDF

Finally, let us share our visual impressions of NERDS@IC2S2:

See you next year at IC2S2 2024 in Philadelphia!

Welcome Anders to NERDS!

Anders Giovanni Møller graduation at ITU

NERDS welcomes a new member: Anders Giovanni Møller. Starting today, Anders will be a PhD student working with Luca Aiello on the COCOONS project at the intersection between NLP and complex systems. Anders can boast a long tenure at ITU, and last week he got his Master’s degree in Data Science. He was selected for a keynote address to the whole 2023 cohort of ITU MSc graduates during the graduation ceremony — a very moving and inspiring speech! Welcome, Anders!

Social media updates: 1000 Twitter followers and Mastodon account

We have reached 1000 Twitter followers, around 3.5 years after having created our profile at: https://twitter.com/nerdsitu 🐦

To celebrate, we have also created a Mastodon account: https://mastodon.social/@nerdsitu 🐘 
For now we are cross-posting between Twitter and Mastodon (and aim to be reactive in both environments), so no matter where you follow us you will receive the same info and be able to stay in touch.

If you like our research, or are interested in our events, job opportunities, or news, make sure to follow us. Happy tweeting/tooting!  

Roberta Sinatra becomes Full Professor at Copenhagen University (SODAS)

Today one of our group’s founders, Roberta Sinatra, became full professor, assuming a new position at the Copenhagen Center for Social Data Science (SODAS) at Copenhagen University (KU): https://sodas.ku.dk/

Congratulations to Roberta – very well deserved!

Having been promoted from assistant professor to associate professor just two years ago, Roberta’s new full professor position hallmarks a stellar career. At SODAS Roberta will be steering the center, head its new ethics committee, and be involved in the center’s new MSc programme in Social Data Science, among other things.

Roberta will have a new main workplace at KU’s city campus (Øster Farimagsgade 5), but luckily she will remain affiliated with us NERDS, so we will keep enjoying her expertise and occasional company in the future. To accommodate this change, Michael Szell will take over her role of group coordinator.

We congratulate Roberta and look forward to many fruitful collaborations with KU!

NERDS is Research Environment of the Year 2022

The Danish Young Academy of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters has chosen out of 62 nominated research environments our research group NEtwoRks, Data, and Society (NERDS) as

Research Environment of the Year 2022

The Academy ceremoniously awarded the title and a prize on June 1st to our group’s nominators, Anastassia and Tiago, who motivated their nomination as follows:

In our group, we openly talk about the struggles of academia, such as stress, high pressure, competitiveness, gender, and racial biases – and about the struggles of our personal lives, such as balancing care duties and research work. As young academics, NERDS is the best company that we could wish for: individuals with curious minds, supporting each other in their personal quests for knowledge and for the betterment of society, which is what ultimately drives us all.

See the Danish Young Academy’s explanation here: http://www.youngacademy.dk/Aktiviteter/Forskningsmiljopris.aspx
Among other points, they write:

In just 3 years, NERDS has managed to create an exemplary academic environment and unity. The group shows that seniority and large center grants are not necessarily the only prerequisites for a good research environment.  

Given this title, we have been asked about our “secret”. Having experienced our fair share of abusive environments, these seem some reasonable guidelines:

  1. Be nice to each other. Corollary: Surround yourself with the right people, and be very sure to not let toxic people into your environment.
  2. Psychological safety is most important. Mistakes are expected, especially in science. It is normal to get stuck in the cloud and we must support each other through it. Disagreements are expected too, and a diversity of perspectives helps resolve them amicably.
  3. Avoid having one boss. Research groups where one person is in power invites abuse. Keep inequalities to a minimum, make important decisions together.
  4. Make sure people have all the freedom to mingle and build up a support network. This will make them strong and protect them from academia’s harassment networks.

Thank you Anastassia and Tiago for the nomination, thank you all NERDS for being so excellent to each other, thank you to our department head Peter Sestoft for the amazing support and efforts to create a great as possible environment on the department level, and cheers to the Danish Young Academy! 🍸

We will do our best to continue living up to this honorable title.

Roberta became co-lead in the AI Pioneer Centre

Yesterday Denmark’s new Pioneer Center for Artificial Intelligence was opened ceremonially, where Roberta took part in a panel discussion. Roberta’s role in the centre will be the new co-load of the Networks and Graphs Collaboratory together with Sune Lehmann.

The Pioneer Centre for Artificial Intelligence focuses on fundamental research, and within an interdisciplinary framework, develops platforms, methods, and practices addressing society’s greatest challenges. It brings together world-class artificial intelligence research in Denmark.

We are excited to see the novel science the centre will enable and produce, and which opportunities it will bring for attracting more world-class research to the country.

Luca Aiello wins Carlsberg Young Researcher Fellowships

Luca Aiello was one of the recipients of this year’s Carlsberg Young Researcher Fellowships.


The Carlsberg Young Researcher Fellowship funds three-year fellowships for newly appointed tenured associate professors to establish an independent research group and forming an international network.

Luca’s winning proposal was awarded with DKK 5M:
COCOONS: COllective COordination through ONline Social media

In the coming decades, a defining task for humanity will be to solve global challenges through mass coordination. The goal of the project is to unveil the prime elements of social interactions that enable spontaneous coordination in the face of social dilemmas. It will do so by quantifying fundamental dimensions of social interactions with Natural Language Processing algorithms applied to online social media conversations, and to leverage principles from complex systems science to find how these dimensions are linked to cooperation outcomes in social networks.

We are excited about Luca’s success and are looking forward to welcome one new PhD student and two postdocs that will be recruited starting October 2022. Stay tuned for upcoming job calls.

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! 🖖

Funding for bicycle network analysis by the Danish Ministry of Transport

Today we received the happy news that the Danish Ministry of Transport is funding our project Netværksanalyse af den danske cykelinfrastruktur (“Network analysis of the Danish cycling infrastructure”): https://www.trm.dk/nyheder/2021/aftale-om-nye-cykelstier-i-alle-dele-af-landet/

This funding will allow us to hire cycling network and urban planning/spatial data expert Ane Rahbek Vierø for a 3-year PhD on the topic, to start Jan 2022, supervised by Michael Szell. Our bicycle network research so far has focused on urban bicycle networks, so this funding will finally allow us to widen our perspective to the regional and national scale. We are looking forward to welcoming Ane in January and to help improving the (already quite good but certainly not perfect) Danish bicycle network!

In more detail, our plans for this project are the following:

In this research project we will apply state of the art metrics and tools from network analysis on Danish open data bicycle infrastructure networks collected from e.g. OpenStreetMap, and additionally incorporate knowledge from cycling planners and mobility researchers, to develop a scientific, evidence-based framework to suggest where to add new network connections or other interventions for improving sustainable bicycle infrastructure. While there are generally good cycling conditions in Denmark, there are many areas that have a quite poor connectivity. Using access to everyday amenities as a baseline can also show that it is not enough to install bicycle lanes – they need to be in the right location and connect to the right places. This research will explore weighting the network according to different attributes to get a more detailed understanding of how connectivity and accessibility might vary for different types of cyclists (in line with Levels of Traffic Stress). We will also use this weighted network to examine cyclists’ access to everyday amenities and facilities, in order to, for example, identify areas where you cannot comfortably cycle to basic amenities (inspired by the 15-minute city). Further, we will explore the effect of high stress intersections on network connectivity for vulnerable road user demographics such as children, and incorporate the distribution of people and workplaces in the analysis. Finally, we aim to develop an interactive web mapping tool that visualizes the results and has the ability to run analyses based on individual demographic variables or preferences of cyclists.

Roberta Sinatra receives YSA award

Today Roberta Sinatra received the 2020 Young Scientist Award for Socio- and Econophysics!

The Young Scientist Award for Socio- and Econophysics is given once a year. It pursues the goal of promoting the work of young researchers and recognizing outstanding scientific contributions that use methods derived from physics to contribute to a better understanding of socio-economic problems.

The award committee has decided to award the prize shared to:

Dr. Roberta Sinatra,

for her outstanding contributions to understanding the social dynamics of science, human mobility and behaviour, on the grounds of network science and statistical physics methods,

AND

Dr. Manlio de Domenico,

for his outstanding and insightful work on multilayer networks and their applications to the field of socio-economic systems.

🎉We congratulate the two recipients! 🎉