Category Archives: Chronicle

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.

We moved into our new NERDS space

Over the summer our research group, and many others at ITU, moved to a new office space, taking over a building from DR, the national Danish Broadcasting Corporation. We NERDS secured a fancy new room housing all our members, which we have started to utilize and develop after the lockdown.

Our room and new address is:
3F11, Kaj Munks Vej 9, DR P4 building (a.k.a. Emil Holms Kanal)

After entering the building, take the elevators on the right. On the 3rd floor go left to the end of the hallway. See you!

Six months of NERDS

We have founded NERDS exactly 6 months ago to be a reference point at ITU for the research on network and data science applications to social systems. At 6 months old, we have already learned to sit up, to roll both ways, and soon we expect to crawl and also grow some teeth. More of our achievements so far:

  • Publications: We published five papers and three preprints:
    Paper 1) Multi-Party Media Partisanship Attention Score. Estimating Partisan Attention of News Media during election. Link
    Paper 2) A sociological study on fake news Link
    Paper 3) A mobility analysis of visitors to the Louvre Museum Link
    Paper 4) Discovering Communities of Community Discovery
    Paper 5) The Impact of Projection and Backboning on Network Topologies
    Preprint 1) An analysis of optimal bicycle network growth strategies: Link
    Preprint 2) A historical comparison of gender inequality in scientific careers: Link
    Preprint 3) A quantitative analysis of success and luck in creative careers: Link
  • Events: We got invited to/visited/presented at numerous events:
    Roberta: May 4 – Monte Carlo Prix Femme de l’année, July 13 – Lipari Complex Networks Workshop, Aug 29 – Cambridge Network Day, Sep 4 – Metascience Conference (Stanford), Sep 25 – Colloquium at SISSA (Trieste)
    Michele: July 13 – Lipari Complex Networks Workshop, Aug 27 – ASONAM (Vancouver)
    Luca: May 21 – Mandag Morgen talk (Bornholm), Sep 7 – Techfest Copenhagen
    Michael: May 23 – DataBeers Copenhagen, July 13 – Lipari Complex Networks Workshop, Oct 16 – Funders Forum on Sustainable Cities (Turin)
  • Organization: Together with KU ad DTU we brought DataBeers to Copenhagen and held two successful (booked out) events so far with 150 attendants each
  • Scientific exchange: We invited 4 expert speakers in the field to ITU, kicking off successfully our ongoing NERDS lunch seminar series
  • Editorial activities: Apart from our ongoing program committee activities, we co-edited a special issue on Science of Stories in PLOS ONE and on Human-Centric Data Science for Urban Studies in the International Journal of Geo-information
  • Outreach: Michael’s award-winning data visualization project “What the Street!?” got incorporated into the permanent exhibition of Futurium, Berlin, on Sep 5th. We are also maintaining an active Twitter account, connecting internationally with researchers and industry: @nerdsitu

What does the future hold?

  • We will welcome a new postdoc joining us on January 1st 2020
  • We look forward for our PhD student Obaida Hanteer to complete his thesis soon
  • We are awaiting and continually submitting grant applications to expand our group
  • We are waiting for reviews for multiple submitted papers
  • Organizing more DataBeers

Our long-term goal is 1) to build up a flourishing network of Denmark-based network/data science research groups, connecting ITU, KU, DTU, and others, 2) continue active collaboration with funding agencies and public stakeholders to solve societal problems with our research, and to further convey its importance to help us grow faster.

Live long and prosper 🖖
Roberta, Michael, Michele, Luca

NERDS launched online

We are thrilled to inform the world about the launch of our new research group: NEtwoRks, Data and Society (NERDS), at IT University of Copenhagen.

We are Michele Coscia, Luca Rossi, Roberta Sinatra, and Michael Szell. Our group’s research focuses on network and data science applications to social systems.

Find us online at nerds.itu.dk and on Twitter: @nerdsitu
Here we will also post job announcements (postdocs etc.)