Category Archives: Team change

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.

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.

Welcome Jacob to NERDS!

Meet the newest member of NERDS – Jacob Aarup Dalsgaard! Jacob is a PhD student in social data science at SODAS – our KU sister group, and will be a visiting PhD student at ITU. Jacob will be diving deep into the world of bias in science, focusing especially on algorithms and models, as part of the BiasExplained project funded by the Villum Foundation. We’re super happy to have him on board and can’t wait to see all the contribution he will bring to the group. 💡

Welcome to the NERDS squad, Jacob! 🖖