Category Archives: Team change

Anastassia defends her PhD: Urban Data Science for Sustainable Mobility

Big congratulations to Dr. Anastassia Vybornova – she defended her thesis yesterday, on Urban Data Science for Sustainable Mobility! 🥳 🎓 This makes Anastassia the first PhD student who did their whole PhD journey at NERDS – about which we are especially proud, besides her brilliant scientific accomplishments.

Supervisor: Michael Szell
Committee: Luca Rossi, Malene Freudendal-Pedersen, Robin Lovelace

Read her thesis here: https://en.itu.dk/Research/PhD-Programme/PhD-Defences/PhD-Defences-2025/March/Anastassia-Vybornova

The thesis spans 8 papers that advance Urban Data Science, exploring how this emerging field can ethically support human mobility that is both environmentally and socially sustainable, through the two lenses of Data and Networks.

In her research she develops algorithms and pipelines for multi-purpose spatial network simplification, for data quality assessment and planning of bicycle networks and low-traffic neighborhoods, showcasing applications to various cities. Further, she outlines pathways for incorporating data ethics into computational approaches to spatial manifestations of social inequalities. Lastly, she investigates the impact of transportation infrastructure on social connections in cities, quantitatively corroborating that urban highways are barriers to social ties. Stemming from various interdisciplinary collaborations, the results of this thesis cover multiple conceptual levels of Urban Data Science, from open source software development and data quality assessment to transportation network planning and the intersection of social and spatial networks. Through these efforts, this thesis advances the emerging field of Urban Data Science, showcasing the field’s potential to make human mobility more sustainable.

With her PhD completed, Anastassia starts a postdoc position at SODAS with Roberta Sinatra, retaining a visiting affiliation at NERDS. Anastassia has been both a professional and social cornerstone of NERDS, so we are lucky we will keep seeing her around. 💜

Update April 4th 2025: The defense and time in Copenhagen made a lasting impact on our external examiner: https://www.robinlovelace.net/post/copenhagenize/

Student promotions

We have two student promotions to celebrate 🎉

First, Elisabetta Salvai has become a PhD student on Jan 1st 2025 at SODAS and the AI Pioneer Centre, supervised by Roberta Sinatra, after having visited us for many months. Her work centers around applying complex systems methods to uncover and explore bias existing in data and machine learning algorithms. She is currently working on the study of fairness in rankings of networks with binary attributes.

She will continue to visit us regularly. Congratulations Betta!

Second, Anastassia Vybornova has submitted her PhD Thesis by Dec 31st 2024, and since Jan 1st 2025 she is formally Postdoc with us for 3 more months until her PhD defense end of March. So, the real celebration for her will be then, but it is nice that she stays with us for 3 more months. In this time, Anastassia keeps finishing up some bicycle network and sustainable mobility papers.

Nikos Salamanos has joined NERDS

At NERDS we welcome our latest member: Nikos Salamanos!

Nikos joins us as postdoctoral researcher, coming from the Cyprus University of Technology, where he was working on applying network analysis to study social media information dissemination.

Nikos will work on an interdisciplinary Villum Synergy project on archaeological data, where he’ll develop network analysis methods to deal with highly biased and incomplete data. The idea is to test how network analysis can aid archaeological research, ultimately applying the newly developed techniques to data retrieved from the remnants of the Roman Empire.

Nikos will be supervised by Michele Coscia and will work jointly with a team of archaeologists led by Tom Brughmans at Aarhus University. Welcome!

Anders Aagaard Kristensen has joined NERDS

At NERDS we welcome our latest member: Anders Aagaard Kristensen!

Anders joins us as PhD student, coming from the University of South Denmark, where he was working on machine learning methods.

His PhD project will be about the use of deep learning and generative models to understand leaves of absence in work data. The idea is to predict, simulate and, ultimately, make interventions, so that workers will have less taxing working schedules, leading to fewer leaves for sickness reasons.

Anders will be working jointly with NERDS and the National Research Center for Work Environment (NFA), which finances his fellowship and provides the data. He will be supervised by Michele Coscia at NERDS.

Claudia Acciai has joined NERDS

We are chuffed to welcome Claudia Acciai to our research group!

Claudia joins us as Postdoc, coming from the Department of Sociology at University of Copenhagen (KU), where she was working on quantifying institutional and country-related Matthew effects in science.

Her work lies at the intersection of comparative public policy, innovation studies and science of science. In her research she combines computational and experimental methods with qualitative content analysis techniques.

At NERDS she joins via the Villum Synergy project Quantifying the Prevalence and Diffusion of Generative AI in Science, supervised by Roberta Sinatra, collaborating closely also with the project’s second PI, Mathias Wullum Nielsen.

Welcome Lasse, the latest NERDS PhD Student!

NERDS keeps growing! This month we’re welcoming Lasse Alsbirk as our latest addition to the team!

Lasse is a co-financed PhD student and at the center of a multi-partnered research project! He will work at the intersection of the Danish Police (financial crimes section), the AI Pioneer Center, and NERDS @ ITU. His project will focus on the application and development of network science tools to fight financial crimes. He has valuable abroad experience, having received his master degree in Israel and he will be with us for four years.

Welcome, Lasse!

Jonas L. Juul has joined NERDS

We are thrilled to welcome Jonas L. Juul to our research group!

Jonas joins us as Assistant Professor, after an illustrious past in network science, having worked -among others- with Mason Porter, Steven Strogatz, Jon Kleinberg, and Sune Lehmann *hashtag namedrop*. He uses statistical methods, mathematical modeling and computer simulations to study social networks, spreading processes and human behavior. Recently, he has been particularly interested in how content spreads between online users, and how to mitigate the spread of diseases in human populations. He approaches these questions both empirically — using methods from modern data science — and theoretically with methods from physics and mathematical modeling.

Jonas had past professional roles at Technical University of Denmark and Cornell University, and he was also part of the Statens Serum Institut’s expert group on mathematical modeling of COVID-19 during the reopening of Denmark in the spring and summer of 2020. Check out Jonas’ cool Webpage to find more information about him.

Mesut Kaya has joined NERDS

We are happy to welcome Mesut Kaya to our research group!

Mesut joins us as an Industrial Postdoc funded by the Innovation Fund. Previously, Mesut was at Aalborg University Copenhagen; before in Delft University and University College Cork. Mesut works on recommender systems in general, at NERDS he will be working with Toine Bogers specifically on recommendation in the HR domain: job recommendation, candidate recommendation, and now the fairness of algorithmic hiring in general.

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.