Great NERDS presence at the 1st CS2 Italy conference in Trento 🇮🇹

The NERDS group showed a strong presence at the 1st conference on computational social science in Trento, Italy. Specifically, current or prior NERDS contributed with 12 talks throughout the two-day conference.🪩

The 2025 edition of the CS2 Italy Conference lead to the establishment of the Society of Computational Social Science in Italy (CS2 Italy), aiming to be the first scientific association of Italian scholars working in CSS. 🇮🇹

Of current NERDS, Arianna Pera and Luca Aiello presented recent and ongoing work on activism and labor movement on social media, both projects related to COCOONS. Luigi Arminio showcased VLLM-based image clustering, Alessia Galdeman gave a talk on voting behaviour in social networks, and Elisabetta Salvai contributed with her work on fairness in network algorithms. Former NERDS members Lucio La Cava, Alessia Antelmi, Jacobo Lenti, Daniele De Vinco, Nicolò Fontana, and Chiara Zappalà also presented their research — most of which were conducted during their time at ITU. 🙌🏼

Overall, this first edition of the CS2Italy was an incredible event with interesting and novel research, a great opportunity to receive valuable feedback on ongoing work, and community networking. With the establishment of the organised society of CSS in Italy and the strong Italian presence in NERDS, we are looking forward to contribute once again next year.

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!

NERDS is now in the Data Science Section

~ Happy new year! ~

A major reorganization of our university, ITU, came into force starting January 1st 2025. This reorganization has replaced the 3 existing departments (of which ours was Computer Science) with 9 smaller sections. Our group NERDS is now part of the new Data Science Section, together with our good colleagues from the research groups NLP, Machine Learning, and the recently established Audio-Visual Computing group.

In total this new section comprises 53 people, led by our own Luca Rossi. Luca is an “ITU old-timer” (10+ years at ITU), bringing outstanding formal+informal know-how of ITU’s processes, ample experience with interdisciplinary collaborations between groups and departments, and excellent strategic and social skills. We are excited about being part of this great group of people, and being led by such an excellent head!

The new Data Science Section will comprise all these friendly people and more:

Now that we are in the Data Science Section, what does this mean in practice, and what does it mean for our future?

  • One aim of the reorganization is to increase internal collaboration through smaller, more focused structures. Given the new Data Science Section will consist of around 25% of the 200+ people from the old Computer Science Department, and that these people are closest to our own research topics, there is a good chance this will indeed lead to more cross-pollination.
  • Teaching-wise, both heads of the Data Science study programs (Therese Graversen for BA and our Luca Aiello for MSc) are consolidated in the new section, together with most faculty who are teaching courses in the data science programs. This provides at least some good coherence and coordination.
  • From an external perspective, nothing will change apart from our new fitting label “Data Science” about which we are glad to have finally arrived at, as “Computer Science” always felt too general and only partially fitting for our diverse research activities, backgrounds, and know-how.

Being part of the largest of the new 9 sections at ITU in terms of total members is also a validation that data science, including our own network-flavored approach to the field, is a fast growing and increasingly important interdisciplinary research area, with such transformative sub-disciplines like AI / ML, NLP, network science, or audio-visual computing. We are happy that also ITU’s management is recognizing the societal value of data science by keeping investing into it.

We expect great times ahead, and we are looking forward to new adventures with old friends in a new configuration, to boldly go where no ITU data scientist has gone before! 🖖

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.

NERDS leave X, join Bluesky and LinkedIn

We have some social media updates:

  1. We leave X (formerly Twitter). Within the month, we will delete our X account because X does not align with our values. We should probably have done this move at least 2 years ago, when we created our Mastodon account, but finally we follow through.
  2. We join Bluesky and LinkedIn. Our new profiles are at:
    https://bsky.app/profile/nerdsitu.bsky.social
    https://www.linkedin.com/in/nerdsitu/
    Let’s connect!

Our Mastodon account at https://datasci.social/@nerdsitu remains our “main” social media account, meaning we will continue prioritizing and interacting only on Mastodon. Other platforms we use as “write-only” for our news, but not for interactions – at least for now.

Let us close with the following quote:

The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.
– Malcolm X (formerly Malcolm Twitter)

NERDS at the D3A Conference

NERDS group made a strong return to the second edition of the D3A conference, held in Nyborg. Our presence across the sessions was extensive, starting from Toine welcoming us in the opening session.

The workshop “Networks, Data, Society, and AI”, organized by Vedran, Lasse, Anders, Anders, and Arianna, sparked inspiring dialogue on AI’s impact on society from diverse perspectives, and brought together an eclectic mix of speakers from industry, academia, and journalism.

Anastassia co-led the workshop “From Classroom to Career: Data Science Degrees and Early Career Opportunities,” which provided valuable guidance for young data scientists navigating the transition from academic studies to professional paths. (We were especially pleased to see Luca as one of the invited speakers here, adding an extra point of view to the session!)

Clément contributed a visually engaging poster on urban bicycle network planning, sparking plenty of conversations about sustainable city design. Mesut shared his latest research on fair recommendations in job markets in the “Fair Division – Economics, Computational Social Science, and AI” session.

All in all, this year’s D3A conference was a fantastic blend of intellectual exchange, practical workshops, and community building. It’s exciting to see the role NERDS is playing in these developments, and we’re already looking forward to bringing even more insights to next year’s event!

NERDS clarify AI’s Physics Nobel

Two weeks ago the Nobel prize in physics was awarded to Hopfield and Hinton for their research on artificial neural networks. This caused quite some uproar, especially by many of our computer science and physics colleagues. As original-physicists-turned-data-scientists-dabbling-in-AI, who have done data-driven Science of Science research exactly on the crucial role of Hopfield and Hinton’s papers in physics, we penned a comment pointing to our clarifying research which was now published as a correspondence in Nature:

Was the Nobel prize for physics? Yes — not that it matters, by M. Szell, Y. Ma, and R. Sinatra

Here the entire correspondence:

The award of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for their groundbreaking research on artificial neural networks (Nature 634, 523–524; 2024) has caused consternation in some quarters. Surely this is computer science, not physics?

Existing data can help to inform this debate. Almost a decade ago, two of us (M.S. and R.S.) co-authored an analysis of referencing and citation patterns that explicitly placed Hopfield’s seminal 1982 paper on neural networks among 3.2 million interdisciplinary papers in non-physics journals that were “indistinguishable from papers published in physics journals”. Six other physics Nobel-winning papers were also in this set (R. Sinatra et al. Nature Phys. 11, 791–796; 2015).

The physics Nobel prize has until recently rewarded conventional ‘core’ physics research, even though Hopfield’s and Hinton’s papers were ripe for recognition (M. Szell et al. Nature Phys. 14, 1075–1078; 2018). We hope that this year’s prize will expedite the breakdown of silos that obstruct thinking across disciplines. Clinging to the idea of research fields as fixed territories is at best small-minded, and at worst harmful, when it comes to solving global challenges such as climate change.

Our original version – before editorial changes – provides a slightly different angle and an instructive figure (that was cut for publication):

New NERDS paper on COVID genome sequencing

Our newest faculty hire Jonas L. Juul is already making a splash. He published a big multi-author paper in Nature Communications: High-resolution epidemiological landscape from ~290,000 SARS-CoV-2 genomes from Denmark, by M.P. Khurana et al

We are happy that with Jonas, who was 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, we have gained a solid footing in medical applications of data/network science.


We examined the drivers of molecular evolution and spread of 291,791 SARS-CoV-2 genomes from Denmark in 2021. With a sequencing rate consistently exceeding 60%, and up to 80% of PCR-positive samples between March and November, the viral genome set is broadly whole-epidemic representative. We identify a consistent rise in viral diversity over time, with notable spikes upon the importation of novel variants (e.g., Delta and Omicron). By linking genomic data with rich individual-level demographic data from national registers, we find that individuals aged  < 15 and  > 75 years had a lower contribution to molecular change (i.e., branch lengths) compared to other age groups, but similar molecular evolutionary rates, suggesting a lower likelihood of introducing novel variants. Similarly, we find greater molecular change among vaccinated individuals, suggestive of immune evasion. We also observe evidence of transmission in rural areas to follow predictable diffusion processes. Conversely, urban areas are expectedly more complex due to their high mobility, emphasising the role of population structure in driving virus spread. Our analyses highlight the added value of integrating genomic data with detailed demographic and spatial information, particularly in the absence of structured infection surveys.