Category Archives: Chronicle

NERDS faculties move into new 4F11 office

Public service announcement: Given all the recent promotions, NERDS faculties also took the ascendance to a physical level to move upwards 3 meters, from our old 3F11 office to our new 4F11 office. The new office has exactly the same dimensions, but features one more work desk to accommodate our part-time professors, and it also comes with a coffee table and coffee seats for added hygge.

There was no particularly strong reason for this move – it’s mostly that we just could. It made the furniture update easier, and it now places our faculties on the floor with all the other research groups which could facilitate ITU-internal collaborations. Also, the view is now slightly improved:

before

after

NERDS is now in the Data Science Section

~ Happy new year! ~

A major reorganization of our university, ITU, came into force starting January 1st 2025. This reorganization has replaced the 3 existing departments (of which ours was Computer Science) with 9 smaller sections. Our group NERDS is now part of the new Data Science Section, together with our good colleagues from the research groups NLP, Machine Learning, and the recently established Audio-Visual Computing group.

In total this new section comprises 53 people, led by our own Luca Rossi. Luca is an “ITU old-timer” (10+ years at ITU), bringing outstanding formal+informal know-how of ITU’s processes, ample experience with interdisciplinary collaborations between groups and departments, and excellent strategic and social skills. We are excited about being part of this great group of people, and being led by such an excellent head!

The new Data Science Section will comprise all these friendly people and more:

Now that we are in the Data Science Section, what does this mean in practice, and what does it mean for our future?

  • One aim of the reorganization is to increase internal collaboration through smaller, more focused structures. Given the new Data Science Section will consist of around 25% of the 200+ people from the old Computer Science Department, and that these people are closest to our own research topics, there is a good chance this will indeed lead to more cross-pollination.
  • Teaching-wise, both heads of the Data Science study programs (Therese Graversen for BA and our Luca Aiello for MSc) are consolidated in the new section, together with most faculty who are teaching courses in the data science programs. This provides at least some good coherence and coordination.
  • From an external perspective, nothing will change apart from our new fitting label “Data Science” about which we are glad to have finally arrived at, as “Computer Science” always felt too general and only partially fitting for our diverse research activities, backgrounds, and know-how.

Being part of the largest of the new 9 sections at ITU in terms of total members is also a validation that data science, including our own network-flavored approach to the field, is a fast growing and increasingly important interdisciplinary research area, with such transformative sub-disciplines like AI / ML, NLP, network science, or audio-visual computing. We are happy that also ITU’s management is recognizing the societal value of data science by keeping investing into it.

We expect great times ahead, and we are looking forward to new adventures with old friends in a new configuration, to boldly go where no ITU data scientist has gone before! 🖖

NERDS leave X, join Bluesky and LinkedIn

We have some social media updates:

  1. We leave X (formerly Twitter). Within the month, we will delete our X account because X does not align with our values. We should probably have done this move at least 2 years ago, when we created our Mastodon account, but finally we follow through.
  2. We join Bluesky and LinkedIn. Our new profiles are at:
    https://bsky.app/profile/nerdsitu.bsky.social
    https://www.linkedin.com/in/nerdsitu/
    Let’s connect!

Our Mastodon account at https://datasci.social/@nerdsitu remains our “main” social media account, meaning we will continue prioritizing and interacting only on Mastodon. Other platforms we use as “write-only” for our news, but not for interactions – at least for now.

Let us close with the following quote:

The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.
– Malcolm X (formerly Malcolm Twitter)

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

Our datasci.social Mastodon server is one year old today

Exactly one year ago Michael has set up the datasci.social Mastodon server, to allow the data/network science community, broadly defined, to build up a new online home after Twitter’s demise. In this time datasci.social has become a vibrant online community with almost 300 people who have joined from all over the world, from various disciplines or from industry. As the first account on the server, also NERDS have set up shop there: After just a year we have successfully amassed almost 500 followers: https://datasci.social/@nerdsitu

However, the point of Mastodon is not quantity, but quality. As Twitter has become X, a platform now known for hate speech and misinformation, we are prioritizing Mastodon and are posting all our news there first. We still keep our X account, as a large part of our scientific community has not yet moved away from X, but we encourage everyone to just try out Mastodon. While Mastodon is not perfect, it is better than other platforms we know, not least because of its extraordinary engagement and civility which makes it great for scientists. If you are interested, sign up here, it’s super easy: https://datasci.social/auth/sign_up

To learn more about datasci.social, see: https://community.datasci.social/

NERDS growth in 2023

Happy new year! We are excited to report many new faces at NERDS, on one hand due to an increased number of interns joining, and on the other hand through Luca’s Carlsberg grant which now starts to kick in.

With Jan 1st, joining us is the new long-term member Arianna Pera as PhD student, who recently got her master degree at Universita Bicocca in Italy. She will work in the area of computational social science, and especially with topics related to coordination. At the same time, we have postdoc Alessia Antelmi from University of Salerno in Italy. She will be with us for 6 months working on higher-order interactions applied to online conversations. Further, Lucio La Cava is a PhD student at the University of Calabria in Italy. He will visit us for three months, working at the intersection of collective coordination and Web3. A future PhD student will be Anders Giovanni Møller, who is currently still a Masterstudent here at ITU. He will start his PhD with us in June but he is already around before then. His main focus is NLP and he will work at the intersection of NLP and social network analysis. Apart from this new batch of 2023 people, we have two more master student interns, Henrik Wolf and Carlson Büth, who are visiting us since fall from Germany, Dresden and Münster, respectively.

All of these excellent new people bring more life to our group – they also have almost filled up all our tables in our large 3F29 section and we might need to look for new space soon. We are happy about all the buzz and intellectual cross-pollination going on!

Our interns are happy and becoming numerous due to our group’s and university’s efforts to be welcoming to visitors. To quote our Positions page:

We are very open to welcome self-funded research visitors if the topic of collaboration makes sense – for such inquiries please contact us via email. If you need funding let us know too: There might be / we might know of possibilities of third-party or internal funding.

Stonks 📈

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!  

Three years of NERDS

NERDS was founded exactly 3 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 3 years old, we have learned to say our name when asked, to not touch hot objects, and to ask “Why?”. We have also grown to a staggering 14 members and have become a vibrant research group with seminars, visiting interns, and fun social gatherings.

On our journey we have made many local friends and strengthened our ties, from DTU and KU (SODAS) to organizations like Supercykelstier. We have also impressed several funding agencies on the way, including VILLUM Foundation, Carlsberg Foundation, DIREC, or the Danish Ministry of Transport – so much that they entrusted us with enough funding to grow our research group further. BTW: We have an open call for 3 Phds/Postdocs.

More of our most important achievements so far:

  • Publications: We have published 46 papers, some of them in top venues like Nature or PNAS, on as diverse topics as bicycle network growth, gender inequality, or multilayer networks.
  • Organization: Together with KU ad DTU we brought DataBeers to Copenhagen and held two successful (booked out) events so far with 150 attendants each. After a pandemic break we look forward to reboot Databeers soon! More recently, Roberta became co-lead of the networks and graphs collaboratory at the newly established AI Pioneer centre.
  • Scientific exchange: After kicking off successfully our ongoing NERDS lunch seminar series in 2019, we have now restarted the series. Let us know if you are interested to present to us!
  • Outreach: Michael’s award-winning data visualization project “What the Street!?” got incorporated into the permanent exhibition of Futurium, Berlin. With our students we also developed other platforms, such as growbike.net and fixbike.net, and we authored several public opinion pieces engaging in policy discussions. We are also maintaining an active Twitter account, connecting internationally with researchers and industry: @nerdsitu
  • Media Coverage: We were covered by top international media such as Le Monde, Der Spiegel, Fast Company, and got interviewed by Captain Kirk.

What does the near future hold?

  • We will hire more postdocs and PhD students with our newly acquired grants
  • We will soon say goodbye to our long-term members Bojan and Yanmeng
  • We will celebrate one of us becoming Full Professor this year
  • We are awaiting and continually submitting even more grant applications to expand
  • Organizing more DataBeers and social events

Looking back to our goals 3 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.

Live long and prosper 🖖
Luca, Michele, Tiago, Bojan, Ane, Luca 2, Vedran, Roberta, Sandro, Michael, Anastassia, Yanmeng

New group photos

Taking advantage of the still relatively relaxed pandemic situation in Denmark we finally all met up and took new group photos:

Taking these group photos was way overdue, since the last time we took one, in April 2019, we were only 4 members. Now we are 14, and growing soon again..

The unsung heroes of NERDS

Our research group has recently grown to a milestone of 10 members, however this number does not give the full picture of NERDS. There are several short-term members and visitors that make our group and its activities more lively, and whose hard work allow our research to fully prosper. Further, now that Corona is kind-of-resolved in Denmark, we want to increase liveliness even more by re-booting our hospitality towards research visitors: If you are interested in visiting us in Copenhagen, for scientific exchange and/or a seminar/talk, please reach out to us.

To shine more light onto our “unsung heros”, here an overview of our past and current NERDS-embedded colleagues, helpers, and friends, apart from the yearly one to two dozen Bachelor and Master students who we supervise:

Victor Møller Poulsen, Intern (2021-08 to 2022-01)
Marilena Hohmann, Intern (2021-08 to 2022-01)
Lasse Buschmann Alsbrik, Research assistant (2021-08 to 2021-10)
Morten Lynghede, Student programmer (2021-06)
Cecilia Laura Kolding Andersen, Student programmer (2021-06)

We have updated our people page accordingly.