Carlson Moses Büth, who visited us last year from University of Münster, Germany, won the VCD Award (1st place Special Award) for his master thesis

From Gridlocks to Greenways: Analyzing the Network Effects of Computationally Generated Low Traffic Neighborhoods

that he wrote at ITU, co-supervised by Anastassia+Michael@NERDS. We congratulate Carlson to this achievement! 🎉

Photos from the VCD Award Ceremony by Jan Zappner

The VCD is the “Verkehrsclub Deutschland”, a major non-profit association and traffic club in Germany that is committed to a socially and environmentally friendly transport transition towards mobility for all road users.

Over the course of his master thesis Carlson also initiated the development of the Python package superblockify which we published recently within the JUST STREETS EU Horizon project we are part of. See: superblockify.city, its Github repository, and the accompanying paper at JOSS.

As one of 32 partners, Michael Szell / ITU is part of the EU (Horizon) project

JUST STREETS – Mobility justice for all: framing safer, healthier and happier streets

that has just started! The consortium includes 12 European cities representing more than 4.5 million citizens. The project aims to transform cities’ car-centered mobility narratives that take for granted that streets are for motorized traffic only, to promote walking, cycling and other active modes of mobility.

To reach this goal, ITU’s part of the project will develop algorithmic methods to study low traffic neighborhoods and bicycle/pedestrian networks, and analyze mobility data with focus on safety, for better planning of human-centric, sustainable mobility.

This grant will provide us funding for a new PhD student, Clément Sebastiao, who has recently joined our group.

Arianna smashed it at ComplexNetworks’23 and delivered the best plenary lightning  for the work “Finding Hidden Swingers in the 2022 Italian Elections Twitter Discourse”. The work is the result of a collaboration with Alessia Antelmi and Lucio La Cava, two dear friends of NERDS who visited us earlier this year. Well done, Arianna and team!

Wow – Roberta Sinatra just won an ERC Consolidator grant! We congratulate her with all our hearts to this once-in-a-lifetime achievement!

An ERC Consolidator grant comes with 2 million EUR for 5 years and enables “a scientist who wants to consolidate their independence by establishing a research team and continuing to develop a success career in Europe”.

Roberta’s excellence, her interdisciplinarity, and her proposed topic just hit the right nerve:

scAIence: Quantifying AI-infused Science

The goal of scAIence is to quantify whether, how, and with which implications generative AI is changing how scientists write, communicate, and diffuse their science, and to explore rigorously the opportunities, dangers, and implications of scientists augmenting their scientific writing with AI. The focus of scAIence is quantitative and based on large-scale data and controlled experiments, since we lack a systematic analysis of AI-generated science: All our evidence regarding AI-generated writing is anecdotal or based on small case studies.

Within the scAIence project, Roberta and her team will deploy a novel computational social science approach, based on a wide array of quantitative disciplines, leveraging large-scale databases of human-generated information and controlled experiments. scAIence will break new ground by (i) introducing the quantitative methods required to understand AI-infused science, (ii) redefining metrics and models to account for AI-generated content in science, and (iii) delivering quantitative scientific insights into how AI is changing the diffusion of science. Taken together, scAIence will lay the scientific foundation for the quantitative study of AI-infused science.

The scAIence project is planned to take place at Roberta’s main affiliation SODAS at Copenhagen University – follow Roberta for upcoming hiring calls for PhD students and Postdocs.