Category Archives: Student

New NERDS paper on urban morphology & street network simplification

A new NERDS co-authored paper is out open-access in the Journal of Spatial Information Science (JOSIS): A shape-based heuristic for the detection of urban block artifacts in street networks, by Martin Fleischmann & Anastassia Vybornova.

a) Bridge, Amsterdam; b) Roundabout, Abidjan; c) Intersection, Kabul; d) Motorway, Vienna. Polygons classified as face artifacts are shown in red, and the OSM street network (without service roads) is shown in black. Face artifacts are polygons enclosed by street network geometries (in the case of OSM, lane centerlines) that do not represent morphological urban blocks, but instead are a result of detailed transportation-focused mapping of the streetscape. Map data (c) OpenStreetMap contributors (c) CARTO

a) Bridge, Amsterdam; b) Roundabout, Abidjan; c) Intersection, Kabul; d) Motorway, Vienna. Polygons classified as face artifacts are shown in red, and the OSM street network (without service roads) is shown in black. Face artifacts are polygons enclosed by street network geometries (in the case of OSM, lane centerlines) that do not represent morphological urban blocks, but instead are a result of detailed transportation-focused mapping of the streetscape. Map data (c) OpenStreetMap contributors (c) CARTO

We propose a cheap computational heuristic for the identification of ‘face artifacts’, i.e., geometries that are enclosed by transportation edges but do not represent urban blocks. Sounds cryptic? Just check out the picture – the artifacts (in red) might be painfully familiar to anyone who has worked with street network data. Our proposed heuristic, implemented open-source in momepy, is the first step towards a fully automated street network simplification workflow. Next steps coming up – stay tuned!

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].

Michael Szell wins EU Horizon grant

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.

PhD Open Call 2024

The ITU-wide PhD Open Call 2024, deadline Feb 25th, is now open!  If your research overlaps with ours and you are interested, get in touch!

Either reach out directly to one of us, or use the student contact form on our students page, where you can also get inspiration for potential research projects. All professors at NERDS are open to PhD supervision and have good ideas for possible PhD projects, so don’t hesitate to reach out. One of our PhD students, Anastassia, has joined us previously through this call.

In Denmark, PhD students are employees, where both salary and working conditions are excellent. The NERDS group is a down-to-earth and fun place to be. Copenhagen is often named as the best city in the world to live in, and for good reasons. It’s world-renowned for food, beer, art, music, architecture, the Scandinavian “hygge”, and much more. In Denmark, parental leave is generous, and child-care is excellent and cheap.

Clément Sebastiao has joined NERDS

Happy new year! 🥳

We are thrilled to welcome Clément Sebastiao to our research group!

Clément joins us as PhD student for 3 years, funded by a EU project we cannot yet legally talk about (but soon), supported by his new supervisor Michael Szell. He completed his Master’s degree in 2023 from ENS Lyon in Complex Systems and Physics. He also has ample experience with internships, including at our friends at ISI Foundation and also at NERDS in 2022, where he started a project on bicycle network growth. He will continue in this vein, developing algorithmic methods to study bicycle/pedestrian networks, low traffic neighborhoods, and mobility data with focus on safety, for better planning of sustainable mobility. Given his interdisciplinary background and know-how in complex networks and systems, he is the ideal candidate for this task, ensuring a smooth takeover of the bicycle network / urban data science torch passed by our now last-year PhD students Ane and Anastassia.

Roberta wins ERC Consolidator grant!

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. 

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!

We welcome 2 new PhD students: Anders and Daniel

This month, another two PhD students join NERDS – Welcome Anders and Daniel!

Anders Weile Larsen is working with Roberta Sinatra (KU, SODAS) and Vedran Sekara (ITU, NERDS) on a project which aims to uncover the fundamental limits of ML and AI for predicting human behavior. Holding a Bachelor’s degree in Cognitive Science and a Master’s in Social Data Science, Anders comes from a highly interdisciplinary background. Anders has previously worked in the Danish Ministry of Taxation where he developed a customer segmentation model and taught Python programming. More recently, as part of the Nation-Scale Social Networks project, Anders has worked on estimating peer effects of library takeouts and modeling patterns of literary consumption. Anders’ PhD is funded by the Danish Pioneer Centre for AI, where he is also affiliated.

Daniel Juhász Vigild is a PhD student at SODAS (our sister group at KU), at the ROCKWOOL Foundation’s Research Unit, and is a visiting PhD student at ITU. He holds a Msc. in Business Analytics from DTU. 
His research examines the digitalization of the public sector, with a focus on quantifying the productivity enhancements and potential social costs of implementing digital initiatives. 
He is currently examining the effect of implementing POL-INTEL, an intelligence-led policing tool implemented in Denmark in 2018.