Networks, Data, and Society (NERDS)

Keynote talk Michael Szell at Alan Turing Institute
2022-06-15 11:20 - 12:05 (Europe/Copenhagen)
Establishing a quantitative science of bicycle networks
Making transportation in cities sustainable is one major key to solving the climate, urban livability, and urban transport crises. To this end, urban data science offers new tools to quantify societal problems in cities and to guide policy makers with human-centric solutions. In this talk I outline our recent and ongoing efforts towards that end, focusing on vulnerable road users and active travel, in particular towards establishing a data-driven science of bicycle networks. I first discuss inequalities between transport modes through mobility space and collision threat analysis, then present new computational methods based on network science to grow and plan bicycle networks optimally and equitably for various urban development stages. All research comes with open code and data, and with concrete policy recommendations towards better urban livability, public health, and decarbonization.

Roberta is an invited speaker and faculty at the Complexity-GAINs International Summer School
2022-07-06 08:00 - 2022-07-08 17:00

Invited talk: Roberta Sinatra at SICSS-Aachen-Graz (online)
2022-07-25 16:00 - 17:30
Roberta will give an invited talk at the (virtual) Summer Institutes of Computational Social Science – Graz Aachen edition:
Quantifying the dynamics of impact in science and art. The unprecedented availability of large-scale datasets about human dynamics has advanced our understanding of social collective phenomena quantitatively.
In this talk, we study the collective phenomenon of success and present a series of findings from the analysis of large-scale datasets of careers in science and art. By using concepts of statistical physics, complex systems, network science, and data science, we will tackle these three questions:
How does impact evolve in a career? How can we untangle luck from ability? What is the role of social networks in achieving high impact?

Roberta is a mentor and speaker at the Science of Science Summer school
2022-08-09 15:00 - 2022-08-10 21:00
Roberta is one of the invited speakers and mentors at the (online) Science of Science Summer school. On August 9th, 2022 she will give a talk and participate in a panel, and she will mentor students on August 9th and 10th

NERDS SEMINAR: Arda Halu
2022-08-25 14:00 - 15:00 | ITU, 3F07, Kaj Munks Vej 11, Copenhagen, 2300, Denmark
Tackling biological context, one network at a time: Examples from network biology and network pharmacology
Arda Halu, Channing Division of Network Medicine, Brigham/ Women’s Hospital (BWH)/Harvard Medical School (HMS)

Abstract
Networks have proven time and again to be highly versatile tools in modeling biological interactions, finding useful applications in basic and clinical research alike. In the majority of these applications, however, the inherently context-specific nature of these interactions remains largely unaccounted for, despite increasingly granular and
multi-dimensional biomedical data. In this seminar, I will present two network-based methods that we are currently developing to address, in a context-aware manner, present challenges related to computational drug discovery and cellular signaling. I will first talk about our method that uses a large-scale pharmacogenomic database to build over 50 cell type-specific gene-perturbation networks and integrates these networks with diverse disease phenotypes and cheminformatic data for a nested prioritization of cell lines and perturbations. I will demonstrate that our method outperforms currently available techniques in terms of predictive power and offers the potential to be a feasible blueprint for a cell type-specific drug discovery and repositioning platform. I will then switch over to a multilayer network-based statistical framework that we are building that uses high-dimensional edges, or multilinks, to model crosstalk between signaling pathways. I will show that using statistically overrepresented multilinks as proxies of crosstalk results in better identification of signaling crosstalk compared to single layer-based methods, suggesting the utility of the multilayer modeling of signaling crosstalk, with potential future applications to extend our approach to tissue- and disease-specific crosstalk.

Bio

Arda Halu is an Instructor in Medicine and Associate Scientist at the Channing Division of Network Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and Harvard Medical School (HMS). His research interests lie at the intersection of network science, computational biology, genomics and systems medicine. Prior to joining the Faculty of Medicine at HMS, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at BWH/HMS (2015-2020) and a Postdoctoral Associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2014-2015). He obtained his PhD in Physics at Northeastern University, Boston, in 2014 (supervised by Dr. Ginestra Bianconi), and holds MS and BS degrees in Physics from Bogazici University in Istanbul, Turkey. Dr. Halu is a recipient (2020-2025) of the Mentored Quantitative Research Career Development Award (K25) from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, National Institutes of Health.

Luca Aiello lecturing at Summer School Ghent Summer of DANS 2022
2022-09-19 | Ghent University, Tweekerkenstraat 2, Ghent, Belgium
Introduction to Data Science

Invited talk Ane, Anastassia, Michael at University of Liverpool, Geographic Data Science Lab
2022-09-22 16:00 - 17:00
Note 3PM BST is 4PM Copenhagen time.

Ane Rahbek Vierø at CRBAM 2022
2022-10-06 10:30 - 12:00 | University of Amsterdam, Oudezijds Achterburgwal 237, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Reproducible Quality Assessment of OSM Data for Cycling
Applications

Anastassia Vybornova at CRBAM 2022
2022-10-06 13:00 - 14:30 | University of Amsterdam, Oudezijds Achterburgwal 237, Amsterdam, Netherlands
The Cycle Node Network Planner: A data-driven decision support tool

Keynote by Luca Aiello at International Conference on Discovery Science 2022
2022-10-11 09:00 - 10:00 | Campus St Priest, 161 Rue Ada, 34095, Montpellier, France
Coloring Social Relationships
Social relationships are the key determinant of crucial societal outcomes, including diffusion of innovation, productivity, happiness, and life expectancy. To better attain such outcomes at scale, it is therefore paramount to have technologies that can effectively capture the type of social relationships from digital data. NLP researchers have tried to do so from conversational text but mostly focusing on sentiment or topic mining, techniques that fall short on either conciseness or exhaustiveness. We propose a theoretical model of 10 dimensions (colors) of social relationships that is backed by decades of research in social sciences and that captures most of the common relationship types. We trained a deep-learning model to classify text along these ten dimensions, and we reached performance up to 0.98 AUC. By applying this tool on large-scale conversational data, we show that the combination of the predicted dimensions suggests both the types of relationships people entertain and the types of real-world communities they shape.
We believe that the ability of capturing interpretable social dimensions from language using AI will help closing the gap between the oversimplified social constructs that existing social network analysis methods can measure and the multifaceted understanding of social dynamics that has been developed by decades of theoretical research.

Roberta Sinatra at Women in Network Science Seminar
2022-10-18 17:00 - 18:30
Pathways in Network Science – A seminar with Roberta Sinatra

Michele Coscia at DINS Seminar Series
2022-10-19 17:00 - 18:00
Quantifying Political Polarization on a Network Using Generalized Euclidean Distance

Roberta Sinatra at Danish Data Science Academy / Pioneer Centre for AI
2022-10-22 10:00 - 11:00 | Frederiksdal Sinatur Hotel, Frederiksdalsvej 360, Frederiksdal, Denmark
Keynote to: Science of Science for Data Scientists

Luca Rossi chairing and moderating NLP, Fake News and Social Media @ Digital Tech Summit
2022-10-25 14:30 - 15:15 | Bella Center, Center Blvd. 5, København, 2300, Denmark
Program:
Welcoming talk: The many faces of Fake News, by session chair, Luca Rossi
NLP, Fake News and Social Media
Scientific Talk: NLP and social media, Marina Charquero Ballestar, Postdoc, AU
Scientific Talk: Editorial media and social media platforms: it’s complicated, Aske Kammer, RUC
Business Talk: Daniel Hanse, tjekdet.dk
Business Talk: Complexities of tacking the challenge of misinformation at scale: tools and possibilities for researchers, Nicole Lyon, Meta
Debate:
Will be announced
Chair: Luca Rossi, Associate Professor, ITU
Moderator: Luca Rossi, Associate Professor, ITU
Session coordinator: Nikolaj Oppermann, Network, Innovation & Collaboration manager, ITU

NERDS Seminar with Nicole Lyons: Meta's Academic and Research Partnerships
2022-10-26 12:30 - 13:30 | ITU, 3F07, Kaj Munks Vej 11, Copenhagen, 2300, Denmark
Meta’s Academic and Research Partnerships
Talk

Nicole Lyons will provide an overview of the Academic and Research Partnerships team, including Meta’s current tools and datasets to support independent research to study Meta’s impact on society. This will include the company’s URL Shares Dataset, Data for Good tools, the newly launched Ads Targeting Dataset and forthcoming Coordinated Inauthentic Behaviour Influence Operations Archive, as well as how the team engages with independent researchers through feedback sessions, conferences and at the monthly Meta Research Exchange.

Bio

Nicole Lyons is a Strategic Partner Manager, as part of the Academic and Research Partnerships team at Meta. This team helps equip independent academic researchers with access and support to Meta’s products and data to better understand Meta’s impact on society. With a background in molecular biology, Nicole led research programs in breast cancer biology in Canada and conducted stem cell research at the Hospital for Sick Children under world-renowned developmental biologist Dr Janet Rossant. Nicole relocated to the UK in 2017 and worked in the non-profit sector, including launching the International Alliance for Cancer Early Detection (ACED) and publishing the Early Detection and Diagnosis of Cancer Roadmap at Cancer Research UK.

Roberta Sinatra at Aarhus University, The Science Studies Colloquium
2022-11-02 16:00 - 17:00
Quantifying biases and inequalities in science
Every day our life is made easier by efficient algorithms that search and rank scientific information. Yet, these algorithms have an issue: they are trained on citation data that is ingrained with human biases. Therefore the output is inherently biased too, creating inequalities, raising concerns of discrimination, and harming economic growth. In this talk, I focus on recent quantitative efforts in science studies to (1) uncover bias mechanisms in science, (2) use this knowledge about biases to uncover inequalities in the scientific enterprise, and (3) create fair metrics and algorithms.

Michele Coscia holds a tutorial at Complex Networks
2022-11-07 13:30 - 16:30 | University of Palermo, Viale delle Scienze Building 19, Palermo, Italy
Node Vector Distances: Methods and Applications
Michele is an associate professor at IT University of Copenhagen since 2020. He mainly works on algorithms for the analysis of complex networks, with methods spanning from Computer Science to physics, and on applying the extracted knowledge to a variety of problems, including economic development, human mobility, and the analysis of ideological polarization. His background is in Digital Humanities, connecting new technologies with a classical education. He has a PhD in CS, obtained in 2012 at the University of Pisa. In the past, he visited Barabasi’s CCNR at Northeastern University, and worked with Ricardo Hausmann for 6 years at the Center for International Development, Harvard University.
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How quickly is a disease spreading through a social network? How diversified is a country in a network of related exported products? How polarized is the online discourse on social media? These seemingly unrelated questions can be answered with a common toolbox: they all require to compare different types of node attributes. In this workshop, you will learn how to apply Node Vector Distance techniques: given two node attributes — represented as vectors — how far the two are on a network structure? Are they correlated when we take into account not only the value of a node itself, but also the values of its neighbors? Or simply: how spread out in the network is an attribute? The workshop will make you familiar with ways to translate concepts such as Euclidean distance, Pearson correlation, and variance, when the vectors do not live in an Euclidean space, but on the complex landscape that is the topology of a network.

Marilena Hohmann at Complex Networks 2022
2022-11-08 11:45 - 12:00 | University of Palermo, Viale delle Scienze Building 19, Palermo, Italy
Estimating Affective Polarization on a Social Network
with Michele Coscia

Roberta Sinatra at ANETLab Seminar
2022-11-25 08:00 - 17:00
Details TBA

NERDS SEMINAR: Claudia Acciai
2022-11-30 12:30 - 13:30 | ITU, 3F07, Kaj Munks Vej 11, Copenhagen, 2300, Denmark
Claudia Acciai is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Sociology (UCPH). In her talk, she will discuss status biases, focusing on how nationality, institutional affiliation, gender and ethnicity can become status signals that, when salient, implicitly influence behaviors in the science system. Claudia’s presentation will draw on recent findings from two studies: a field experiment that investigates open science behaviors and attitudes, and an observational study that quantifies the differential impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the duration of peer-review process for scientists at different strata of the institutional-prestige hierarchy.

DataBeers Copenhagen
2022-11-30 19:00 - 21:00 | Station, Howitzvej 30, Frederiksberg, Denmark
Tweets by databeers_cph

Roberta Sinatra at Northwestern University Panel on “Inequalities in Scientific Production”
2022-12-08 19:30 - 21:00

Michael and Ane at CASA UCL Seminar
2022-12-14 16:00 - 17:00
Bicycle networks: From data quality assessment to computational analysis
Cycling is marginalized despite being a promising solution towards sustainable transport. In parallel, cycling data and cycling research are also marginalized, posing many opportunities for improvement and open questions. Here, we first present our cycling data quality tool which enables intrinsic and extrinsic assessment and reporting of data quality in cycling infrastructure data sets, focusing on the structural network perspective. Then, we explore how such data enable the development of computational methods for automated bicycle network analysis and planning.

NERDS Seminar with Francisco Rowe
2023-02-15 12:30 - 13:30 | ITU, 3F07, Kaj Munks Vej 11, Copenhagen, 2300, Denmark
Our NERDS seminars continue on Wednesday Feb 15 with a talk from Francisco Rowe, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Geography and Planning, University of Liverpool.
Francisco Rowe will introduce the research project ITINERANT: InequaliTies IN Experiencing uRbAn fuNcTion:
ITINERANT aims to understand how different socio-economic groups experience, access and benefit from the wide array of functions cities offer. To this end, ITINERANT uses machine learning and combines a variety of traditional and digital footprint sources to measure urban function and capture how people move through these functional spaces. Understanding of how people use urban spaces is key to develop policies that ensure that benefits in accessibility to urban amenities are shared fairly across society. In the talk, we will describe the key findings of the project. First, we will describe the extent to which people move from urban areas to suburbs and further afield during COVID-19. Second, we will present a novel approach to create a classification of urban function. Third, we will show differences in the patterns of how people from different deprivation areas move across ranging types of urban functions.

NERDS Seminar with Jonas Juul
2023-02-22 12:30 - 13:30 | ITU, 3F07, Kaj Munks Vej 11, Copenhagen, 2300, Denmark
On Wednesday Feb 22, Jonas Juul (DTU) will present his talk “Harder, better, faster, stronger cascades – or simply larger?” on the dissemination of online content.
Abstract:
Do some types of online content spread faster or further than others? In recent years, many studies have sought answers to such questions by comparing statistical properties of network paths taken by different kinds of content diffusing online. Here we demonstrate the importance of controlling for correlations in the statistical properties being compared. In particular, we show that previously reported structural differences between diffusion paths of false and true news on Twitter disappear when comparing only cascades of the same size; differences between diffusion paths of images, videos, news, and petitions persist. Paired with a theoretical analysis of diffusion processes, our results suggest that in order to limit the spread of false news it is enough to focus on reducing the mean “infectiousness” of the information. Joint work with Johan Ugander (Stanford University)

NERDS Seminar with Louisa Jane Di Felice
2023-03-01 12:30 - 13:30 | ITU, 3F07, Kaj Munks Vej 11, Copenhagen, 2300, Denmark
Talk: The issue of scale in anarchy: an information perspective
Anarchist collectives are self-organized, non-hierarchical and anti-authoritarian. It is often argued that the scope of such collectives is limited, as they cannot grow in size or complexity without requiring some form of delegation or centralized hierarchical control. More generally, the emergence of control hierarchies in societies is viewed as unavoidable by mainstream historians, anthropologists, and theorists of “social complexity”. However, many anarchist collectives operate through networks that can be vast in scale and scope and may provide the blueprint for alternative social configurations. From an information perspective, these groups operate in a decentralized way, exchanging information locally and distributing decision-making across multiple nodes. This research aims to use agent-based modelling (ABM) as a tool for utopia-building. In the first stage, interviews with members of collectives in the neighbourhood of Vallcarca (Barcelona), are used to shape an ABM that abstracts the main information characteristics of their decision-making configurations, building on the theory of multi-scale systems. In the second stage, the model will be used to explore alternative futures and configurations with the same collectives, up-scaling current practices as a means to discuss possible realities outside of the dominant one. Questions of interest include how to deal with global issues (e.g., climate change) without deferring to delegation, how to include randomness in decision-making as a way to dilute power, and how to maintain consensus-based approaches in large-scale collectives.
Bio
Louisa Jane Di Felice is a post-doctoral researcher in the Autonomous Critical and Embedded Systems (ACES) group at Télécom Paris, part of the Computer Science and Networks Department, and in the Political Ecology Lab at the University of Barcelona, in the Department of Economic History and Institutions. She holds a PhD from the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA) of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, where she studied the implications of complexity for energy models at the science-policy interface. Her main research interests include hierarchy theory and theories of multi-scale systems, complexity, sustainability and environmental justice.

Michael at CSH, Vienna
2023-04-04 15:00 - 16:00 | csh, Josefstaedter Strasse 39, Vienna, 1800, Austria
Bicycle infrastructure data and networks: Opportunities and limitations
In this talk, we will explore the opportunities and limitations of bicycle infrastructure data, models and networks. With the increasing popularity of cycling as a mode of transportation, the need for accurate and reliable data on bicycle infrastructure has become crucial for planners, engineers, and policymakers.

CSH Vienna workshop: Sustainable mobility
2023-04-14 09:00 - 12:15
We are organizing a workhop in Vienna!
Sustainable Mobility: Data, Networks, and Complexity

Why are politicians so reluctant to invest into bicycle infrastructure and pedestrianization given it is the most efficient investment towards sustainable and livable cities? What are the technical and political bottlenecks that keep society in the stranglehold of car dependency, and what are the implications of sustained delay? Which data are we missing, how should we grow network infrastructure, and how to speed up the sluggish political process? The climate crisis demands pressing answers, which we explore here with state-of-the-art insights in Data/Network/Complexity Science and Urban Planning.
This workshop brings together researchers and policymakers from Vienna and Copenhagen who work on understanding the best pathways towards sustainable mobility with focus on cycling, or who are developing tools/methods supporting that aim. Our speakers will cover: Mobility and infrastructure data quality, bicycle network planning, politics & activism, systemic complexity approaches.

Michael at Eurosolar Austria, Vienna
2023-04-20 18:30 - 20:00 | Plutzerbrau, Schrankgasse 2, Vienna, 1070, Austria
Wie man optimale Radweg-Netze plant
Eurosolar Austria

Ane at Velo-City 2023
2023-05-09 11:00 - 12:00
Examining Bicycle Network Data: A reproducible workflow for evaluating data quality
Session: The potential of open data for better infrastructure
