Anthony Zhou has joined NERDS as a Research Assistant in the FemVision Project. Anthony recently graduated from the Social Data Science Msc Program of Copenhagen University and has a Bachelor in Public Health and Data Science from the University of Washington. Anthony has experience both with complex data pipelines as well as in studying Illicit maritime networks.
We’re happy to have you on board, Anthony!
Big congratulations to Anders for successfully defending his PhD thesis on how AI is changing Computational Social Science and the Web. The Committee was composed by Elisa Mekler, Robert West, and Johannes Bjerva. His very proud supervisor is Luca Aiello.
During his three years with NERDS, Anders has published 6 papers in the areas NLP and CSS, pioneering topics such as synthetic data generation with LLMs and AI persuasion. His graduation officially concludes the COCOONS project.
Anders has now started a job in the industry as AI Lead of Polaris, in Copenhagen.
In bocca al lupo, Anders!
Marcus joins us as a new PhD Student. With a background in Data Science, and experience from the danish news media Politiken, he is a perfect fit! Marcus also plays the trumpet in his free time. He will work with Vedran Sekara on uncovering how climate change impacts human behaviors.
Marcus will work on the Climate Adapt project funded by Independent Research Fund Denmark (DFF) and we hope insights from the project will ultimately provide data-driven recommendations to policy makers on how to design effective responses to climate change.
We are thrilled to have you on board, Marcus!
Ariel joins us as a new Research Assistant. With his background in the physics of complex systems, he will work with Jonas L. Juul on quantifying how networks change.
One important application of Ariel’s work could be in the shipping industry, and the project is funded by two maritime foundations: Orient’s Fund and the Danish Maritime Fund.
We are thrilled to have you on board, Ariel.
Ahoy!
Big congratulations to Arianna for successfully defending her PhD thesis on the role of language in fostering grassroots collective action. The Committee was composed by Luca Rossi, Fabiana Zollo, and Sune Lehmann. Her very proud supervisor is Luca Aiello.
During her three years with NERDS, Arianna has published 7 paper in the areas of mobilization framing, computational narratives, and applied NLP. She has become a very active member of the international Computational Social Science community, which will benefit from her work for many years to come.
On March 1st she will start a research position at SODAS with Clara Vandeweerdt.
In bocca al lupo, Arianna!
Big congratulations to Dr. Luigi Arminio. Yesterday he defended his thesis on Polarisation in an Evolving Social Media Landscape: Multimodal Insights from the Climate Debate.
Supervisor: Luca Rossi
Committee: Luca Aiello, Cornelius Puschmann, Cindy Shen
We are extremely happy and proud of Luigi’s research dealing with the crucial issue of online polarisation and producing both substantial contribution as well as methodological advancements.
Luigi’s work is built on 6 papers and investigated both textual and visual data. On the textual side he showed how opposite groups in a polarised debate are recognisable by specific socio-linguistic feature that we can detect computationally. On the visual side he contributed to the development of a research pipeline that leverages Visual Large Language Models to produce semantic clustering of visual content. This was then used to study the ongoing visual narratives surrounding the climate debate.
On March 1st Luigi will start a research position at Roskilde University in the context of the Algorithms, Data & Democracy project but we know that our collaboration isn’t over.
Jacob joins us as a new postdoc, bringing degrees in mathematics and extensive experience with data‑driven modeling of epidemics.We welcome our latest NERDS member: Manuel Knepper.
Manuel, who is already guest at NERDS since a few months, joins now as a research assistant for one year, after having finished a master in data science here at ITU with Michele and Anastassia on predicting cyclist flows with machine learning methods.
Manuel will work with Michael and Anastassia on the recently won InnoExplorer grant as research software engineer to turn raw bicycle network algorithms into packaged Python software usable for urban planners, helping us close the gap between research and policy/application. Manuel’s background, his thesis, and also his industry experience with data and software engineering makes him a perfect fit for this role. Besides, Manuel will also be teaching assistant for the geospatial data science course in spring.
We are excited to have you with us, Manuel. Welcome!
We welcome our latest NERDS member: Ditte Bjerregaard.
Ditte joins as a new PhD student, coming with a background in anthropology, and as the founder and director of the Center for Violence Prevention (Center for Voldsforebyggelse, https://centerforvoldsforebyggelse.com/).
Ditte will work with Michele Coscia, using data from police reports and court cases involving femicide, to understand the determinants and, hopefully, create early warning systems. We are excited to have you with us, Ditte. Welcome!
We welcome our latest NERDS member: Morten Boilesen.
Morten joins as a new PhD student, coming with degrees in mathematics, musicology, and engineering, and experience as a start-up data scientist.
Morten will work with Jonas L Juul on the InForM project (funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation), using Danish register data to study how COVID-19 spread in Denmark. 3 exciting years ahead! We are excited to have you with us, Morten. Welcome!