Category Archives: Activity

NERDS at the Bridging Approaches in Science of Science Workshop in Munich

Last week, NERDS made their mark at the Bridging Approaches in Science of Science workshop in Munich! 🥨 The event, organized by the European Network for the Science of Science, brought together researchers from diverse backgrounds to discuss new methodologies and perspectives in the field.

Claudia Acciai presented her work on misinformation spreading and perception among scientists, sparking insightful discussions. Elisabetta Salvai and Jacob Aarup Dalsgaard also attended, engaging with the community and exchanging ideas. 🔬

The workshop was a fantastic opportunity to connect with researchers across disciplines, gather feedback on ongoing work, and explore potential collaborations. With such an inspiring exchange of ideas, we are excited to keep building bridges in the science of science community, and we are looking forward to gathering together soon at the ICSSI conference in Copenhagen!

Great NERDS presence at the 1st CS2 Italy conference in Trento 🇮🇹

The NERDS group showed a strong presence at the 1st conference on computational social science in Trento, Italy. Specifically, current or prior NERDS contributed with 12 talks throughout the two-day conference.🪩

The 2025 edition of the CS2 Italy Conference lead to the establishment of the Society of Computational Social Science in Italy (CS2 Italy), aiming to be the first scientific association of Italian scholars working in CSS. 🇮🇹

Of current NERDS, Arianna Pera and Luca Aiello presented recent and ongoing work on activism and labor movement on social media, both projects related to COCOONS. Luigi Arminio showcased VLLM-based image clustering, Alessia Galdeman gave a talk on voting behaviour in social networks, and Elisabetta Salvai contributed with her work on fairness in network algorithms. Former NERDS members Lucio La Cava, Alessia Antelmi, Jacobo Lenti, Daniele De Vinco, Nicolò Fontana, and Chiara Zappalà also presented their research — most of which were conducted during their time at ITU. 🙌🏼

Overall, this first edition of the CS2Italy was an incredible event with interesting and novel research, a great opportunity to receive valuable feedback on ongoing work, and community networking. With the establishment of the organised society of CSS in Italy and the strong Italian presence in NERDS, we are looking forward to contribute once again next year.

NERDS at the D3A Conference

NERDS group made a strong return to the second edition of the D3A conference, held in Nyborg. Our presence across the sessions was extensive, starting from Toine welcoming us in the opening session.

The workshop “Networks, Data, Society, and AI”, organized by Vedran, Lasse, Anders, Anders, and Arianna, sparked inspiring dialogue on AI’s impact on society from diverse perspectives, and brought together an eclectic mix of speakers from industry, academia, and journalism.

Anastassia co-led the workshop “From Classroom to Career: Data Science Degrees and Early Career Opportunities,” which provided valuable guidance for young data scientists navigating the transition from academic studies to professional paths. (We were especially pleased to see Luca as one of the invited speakers here, adding an extra point of view to the session!)

Clément contributed a visually engaging poster on urban bicycle network planning, sparking plenty of conversations about sustainable city design. Mesut shared his latest research on fair recommendations in job markets in the “Fair Division – Economics, Computational Social Science, and AI” session.

All in all, this year’s D3A conference was a fantastic blend of intellectual exchange, practical workshops, and community building. It’s exciting to see the role NERDS is playing in these developments, and we’re already looking forward to bringing even more insights to next year’s event!

NERDS at ASONAM’24

A bunch of nerds posing in front of the asonam conference logoLuigi Arminio wins the asonam best phd dissertation award

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!

NERDS at IC2S2’24 in Philly!

A tactical squad of 6 NERDS attended this year’s IC2S2 in Philly, and presented 9 works:

We are grateful to the organizers for the great event, and we look forward to IC2S2 coming back to scandinavia in 2025!

NERDS at ICWSM’24

This week, Arianna and Anders are representing NERDS at ICWSM in Buffalo, NY, with two freshly-published papers.

  1. 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.
  2. 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].

5 years of NERDS!

NERDS was founded 5 years ago by three young assistant professors and one associate professor, to be a reference point at ITU for the research on network and data science applications to social systems. At 5 years old, we have learned to write our name (we have a logo), to follow rules, and to use a fork and knife for eating. And hoo boy, did we use that fork last friday when celebrating our anniversary with an original NERDS cake!

We also got new group photos taken (by Sebastian Mateos Nicolajsen – thx!), see below, because we have grown to 20+ members over the years! For all bean counting aficionados, we also won over 5M EUR of research funding and published 84 papers so far.

Further highlights, shown in the timeline above. We:

Looking back to our goals 5 years ago, we have all reason to be proud to have 1) built up a flourishing network of Denmark-based network/data science research groups, connecting ITU, KU, DTU, and others, 2) successfully impressed several funding agencies and public stakeholders to engage with us solving societal problems with our research. We will continue along this road, developing further our group in a safe and fun environment.

In our near future, we look forward to welcoming several new group members in the fall, including one assistant professor and several PhDs/Postdocs.

Live long and prosper 🖖
Luca, Luigi, Roberta, Claudia, Anastassia, Jacob, Vedran, Sandro, Anders, Michele, Anders 2, Ane, Toine, Mesut, Luca 2, Michael, Arianna, Clement, Elisabetta, Alessia, Jacopo, Daniele, Nicoló

NERDS back from D3A conference

Last week several of us NERDS took part in the first D3A conference in Nyborg, where an astonishing 500 data scientists from all around Denmark met to discuss the latest research in the field.

The Danish Digitalization, Data Science and AI (D3A) is a new national conference hosted by Pioneer Centre for AI (P1), Danish Data Science Academy (DDSA), and Digital Research Center Denmark (DIREC). 

While most of us just enjoyed the company and the scientific inspirations in a perfectly organized setting, two of us also presented actively: Sandro presented a poster on science & gender, while Ane co-organized the workshop “An interdisciplinary dive into Climate IT”, presenting our research on bicycle networks.

Here a few visual impressions from our trip:

We hope to see you in future editions of the conference, the next one coming up in October.

Report from our latest Nightingale Network meeting

It has taken us almost 2 years, but we finally managed to co-organize a new Nightingale Network meeting yesterday!

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.

The gathering of around 30 researchers took place in the top, 15th floor of the colossal Maersk tower, where we held IC2S2 earlier this year. With many new faces joining all our groups in Denmark, again many new social ties were forged and old ties strengthened, making full use of our nerdy open-source party-games: https://github.com/NERDSITU/nerdyicebreakers (including a new one by main organizer Laura)

Here the press-shots of the winners in the three games Bingo (Arianna), Nerdgame (Ben, last nerd standing – with a very consistent outfit), and the new Six degrees of wikipedia (Mirko, Arianna, Pantelis, Peter, Sandro):

 

 

 

 

 

If you are from Denmark (or closeby) and share our research interests, please reach out to us if you want to be part of the next meeting!