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!

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

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.)

The NERDS webpage is now online. Soon an ITU subdomain will be set up for the official launch of the group.