NEtwoRks, Data, and Society (NERDS)

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

NERDS SEMINAR: Claudia Acciai
2022-11-30 12:30 - 13:30 (Europe/Copenhagen) | 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.

Roberta Sinatra at ANETLab Seminar
2022-11-25 08:00 - 17:00 (Europe/Copenhagen)
Details TBA

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

Michele Coscia holds a tutorial at Complex Networks
2022-11-07 13:30 - 16:30 (Europe/Copenhagen) | 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.

Roberta Sinatra at Aarhus University, The Science Studies Colloquium
2022-11-02 16:00 - 17:00 (Europe/Copenhagen)
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.

NERDS Seminar with Nicole Lyons: Meta's Academic and Research Partnerships
2022-10-26 12:30 - 13:30 (Europe/Copenhagen) | 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.

Luca Rossi chairing and moderating NLP, Fake News and Social Media @ Digital Tech Summit
2022-10-25 14:30 - 15:15 (Europe/Copenhagen) | 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

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

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

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

Keynote by Luca Aiello at International Conference on Discovery Science 2022
2022-10-11 09:00 - 10:00 (Europe/Copenhagen) | 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.

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

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

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

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

NERDS SEMINAR: Arda Halu
2022-08-25 14:00 - 15:00 (Europe/Copenhagen) | 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.

Roberta is a mentor and speaker at the Science of Science Summer school
2022-08-09 15:00 - 2022-08-10 21:00 (Europe/Copenhagen)
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

Invited talk: Roberta Sinatra at SICSS-Aachen-Graz (online)
2022-07-25 16:00 - 17:30 (Europe/Copenhagen)
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 an invited speaker and faculty at the Complexity-GAINs International Summer School
2022-07-06 08:00 - 2022-07-08 17:00 (Europe/Copenhagen)

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 gives a Keynote at Nordic Network for Science of Science
2022-06-13 13:00 - 14:00 (Europe/Helsinki) | center for philosophy at University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
The Nordic research councils in the Humanities and Social Sciences have provided generous funding to establish the Nordic Network for Science of Science and to run a series of workshops about the latest research on the science of science, focusing on the research scene within the nordic countries. Roberta is giving a keynote at the first workshop, hosted in Helsinki, about “Quantifying the biases of scientific impact“.

NERDS SEMINAR: Rossano Schifanella, University of Turin
2022-06-08 12:30 - 13:30 (Europe/Copenhagen) | ITU, 3F07, Kaj Munks Vej 11, Copenhagen, 2300, Denmark
Revealing the determinants of gender inequality in urban cycling with large-scale data
by Rossano Schifanella, Associate Professor in Computer Science at the University of Turin.
Abstract
Cycling is an outdoor activity with massive health benefits and an effective solution for sustainable urban transport. Despite these benefits and the recent rising popularity of cycling, most countries still have a negligible uptake. This uptake is especially low for women: there is a largely unexplained, persistent gender gap in cycling. To understand the determinants of this gender gap in cycling at scale, here we use massive, automatically collected data from the tracking application Strava on outdoor cycling for 61 cities across the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, and the Benelux area. Leveraging the associated gender and usage information, we first quantify the emerging gender gap in recreational cycling at city level. A comparison of cycling rates of women across cities within similar geographical areas unveils a broad range of gender gaps. On a macroscopic level, we link this heterogeneity to a variety of urban indicators and provide evidence for traditional hypotheses on the determinants of the gender-cycling gap. We find a positive association between the female cycling rate and urban road safety. On a microscopic level, we identify female preferences for street-specific features in the city of New York. Enhancing the quality of the dedicated cycling infrastructure may be a way to make urban environments more accessible for women, thereby making urban transport more sustainable for everyone.

NERDS SEMINAR: Marina Georgati, AAU
2022-06-01 12:30 - 13:30 (Europe/Copenhagen) | ITU, 3F07, Kaj Munks Vej 11, Copenhagen, 2300, Denmark
Machine learning for cohort-based high-resolution spatial population projections
Marina Georgati, Aalborg University CPH
Abstract
Cities expand rapidly with international migration significantly contributing to urban growth and urban population change. However, cities miss out on a great opportunity of reclaiming valuable knowledge on future population distribution due to the lack of established tools and methodologies to project where it is more likely for people of specific socio-demographic groups to set up home. The present work suggests that spatially explicit projections can play a significant role as a tool for urban planning and for managing diversity creatively, especially when a combination of social, demographic, and topographic data is utilized. Machine learning techniques have demonstrated capabilities to capture relationships among this plethora of urban features to estimate future population distribution. We present a flexible, ML-based methodology for high-resolution gridded population projections by demographic characteristics, while combining various socio-demographic and topographic input layers.

Bio
PhD fellow with background in architecture and geoinformation. I am interested on working at the intersection of socio-economic studies and computer sciences. I am currently exploring Machine Learning solutions for cohort-based spatial population projections. Passionate with urban analysis, demography and programming, I focus on migration patterns and their spatio-temporal variations at local level in European cities within the scope of the H2020 FUME Project.

Roberta giving a keynote at INAS
2022-05-26 - 2022-05-27 | eui florence, Italy
Roberta gives a keynote talk entitled Quantifying the biases of scientific success at the 14th annual International Conference of Analytical Sociology

Invited Talk Anastassia Vybornova at Citizens Collective (CUSP, TU Delft)
2022-05-18 16:00 - 17:00 (Europe/Copenhagen)
Will Cycling Save Our Cities? A Story of Love and Panic

The climate crisis is putting our future in danger. Cycling is often described as the go-to “green bullet” to make transportation in cities more sustainable and to reduce our exacerbated fossil fuel consumption. But can we still win the global war on cars, or are our beloved cities (and with them, their inhabitants) doomed anyways? I will share a personal account of my journey into cycling research, which is a story of reciprocated love and well-founded panic. I invite you to join me on a bumpy ride to rethink urban mobility: Let’s pet the elephants in the room – and share our visions of being on the road.

Roberta talking about Complex Systems for Mondadori Scuola (in Italian)
2022-04-19 17:00 - 18:20 (Europe/Copenhagen)
The talk will be streamed realtime here:

Details of the event:
https://www.mondadorieducation.it/formazione-e-aggiornamento/appuntamenti/la-fisica-dei-sistemi-complessi-il-tutto-e-piu-della-somma-delle-parti/

Talk: Luca Maria Aiello at ANET Lab Seminar Series
2022-04-01 10:00 - 11:00 (Europe/Copenhagen)
Abstract
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.
Bio
Luca Aiello is an Associate Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen. Previously, he worked for 10 years as a Research Scientist in the industry: at Yahoo Labs in Barcelona, and at Bell Labs in Cambridge (UK). He conducts research in Computational Social Science, a field of studies that uses Social Science theories to inform solutions to Data Science problems. His work focuses on the analysis of conversations and collective behavior through the lens of machine-learning algorithms applied to large scale data. He was recently awarded the Carlsberg Young Investigator Fellowship to study how to build technologies to support collective cooperation in the face of societal dilemmas.
Sign up at: http://anet.krtk.mta.hu/seminars/

NERDS Seminar: Giulia Reggiani
2022-03-23 12:30 - 13:30 (Europe/Copenhagen)
Understanding bikeability of urban networks
Giulia Reggiani, Delft University of Technology

About the author:
Giulia Reggiani is ending her PhD in the department of Transport and Planning, Delft University of Technology. Her research in the last 4 years focused on structural properties of bicycle networks worldwide and on data driven methods for assessing bikeability. Her current interests lie in the broad domains of smart mobility, data analysis, and sustainability.
About the presentation:
Having a bicycle network that is fully separated from vehicular traffic is not realistic even for top-performing cities. Thus, cycling in most countries entails switching between streets with different length, safety, and comfort levels. As a consequence, the quality of bicycle networks should not be evaluated based on one but multiple factors and by considering the different preferences of the users between the factors.In this presentation I will define and analyse different types of bicycle networks and present findings on bicycle infrastructure development across 47 cities. Then, I present a multi-objective methodology to assess bikeability per origin-destination (OD) pair and for the entire network, useful for evaluation and planning of bicycle networks. I do so by introducing the concept of “bikeability curves” which allows to assess how bikeable a network is for for its heterogeneity of users. This methodology is showcased on two cities with different bike cultures: Amsterdam and Melbourne.

Invited Talk Michael Szell at PhyMo22
2022-03-11 09:30 - 10:00 (Europe/Copenhagen)
Towards a human-centric urban data science
Making our cities better and sustainable is key to solving the climate and urban transport crises. To this end, urban data science offers new tools to quantify societal problems in cities and to propose human-centric solutions to policy makers. In this talk I outline our recent and ongoing efforts towards that end, focusing on urban transport and vulnerable road users. I discuss inequalities between transport modes through mobility space and collision threat distributions, and automated methods based on network science to generate and merge bicycle networks and to identify their gaps, for different urban development stages. All research comes with concrete policy recommendations that significantly increase urban livability, public health, and decarbonization.
