Michele Tizzoni

Mobility-driven synthetic contact matrices as a scalable solution for real-time pandemic response modeling
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Step 1: Insert bacteria ("Wolbachia") into mosquitoes.

Step 2: Release mosquitoes.

Step 3: Watch Dengue rates plummet.

Phenomenal results from Singapore.

Link: tinyurl.com/59c9t67u, by Lim et al.

Higher-order adaptive behaviors outperform pairwise strategies in mitigating contagion dynamics When exposed to a contagion phenomenon, individuals may respond to the perceived risk of infection by adopting behavioral changes, aiming to reduce their exposure or their risk of infecting others. Th...

Another new preprint on group adaptation! 📣
Great joint work w/ @martonkarsai.bsky.social and @alainbarrat.bsky.social!

Can adaptive behaviors driven by group interactions be more effective and less costly than pairwise ones? How do their adaptive mechanisms differ?

arxiv.org/abs/2602.05915

🧵 1/7

Impact of behavioral heterogeneity on epidemic outcome and its mapping into effective network topologies Human behavior plays a critical role in shaping epidemic trajectories. During health crises, people respond in diverse ways in terms of self-protection and adherence to recommended measures, largely r...

Impact of behavioral heterogeneity on epidemic outcome and its mapping into effective network topologies arxiv.org/abs/2601.21743

📣 CS2Italy 2026 the Italian Conference on Computational Social Science
⏰ Today is the last day to submit your abstract

📍 Turin, May 19–21

We welcome abstract submissions in:
#ComputerScience #NetSci #ComplexSystems #Sociology #Economics #Politics #CognitiveScience #Psychology

👉 cs2italy.org

📢 Keynotes++:
Alessandro Flammini – Indiana University
👉 information propagation
👉 online misinformation
👉 social influence

📷 Submit your abstract by Jan 30! (2 days left!)
cs2italy.org

Socioeconomic Determinants of the COVID-19 Infodemic The COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied by an infodemic of misinformation that impedes effective public health responses. This study examines relationships between socioeconomic factors and infodem...

Socioeconomic Determinants of the COVID-19 Infodemic arxiv.org/abs/2601.18377

Indonesia’s shift to cleaner cooking fuels has greatly improved air quality and health—

In 2000, less than 10% of the population in Indonesia had access to clean cooking fuels. This is now over 90%, as the chart shows.

Our new collective effort highlights what happens when AI acts in populations rather than as isolated tool. TL;DR: a lot.

I'm exhausted and the week hasn't even started.

Role of behaviour change in controlling the 2022 Paris mpox outbreak Nature Health - Behaviour changes, rather than vaccination or postinfection immunity, best explained the sudden decline of mpox cases among men who have sex with men during an outbreak in the Paris...

*New paper in Nature Health*

Why did the 2022 mpox outbreak in Paris decline so abruptly?

rdcu.be/eZ24H

Block-Fitness Modeling of the Global Air Mobility Network Accurate representations of the World Air Transportation Network (WAN) are fundamental inputs to models of global mobility, epidemic risk, and infrastructure planning. However, high-resolution, real-t...

Block-Fitness Modeling of the Global Air Mobility Network
arxiv.org/abs/2601.13867

📢 Keynotes++:
Milena Tsvetkova - @mtsvetkova.bsky.social
London School of Economics and Political Science

on how social networks, algorithms, and HCI shape collective behavior, inequality, cooperation, and social influence

👉 Submit your abstract by Jan 30!
cs2italy.org

Nearly a third of social media research has undisclosed ties to industry, preprint claims Industry-linked studies were also more likely to focus on particular topics, suggesting these ties may be skewing the field

www.science.org/content/arti...

Lagrange Fellowship Call The Lagrange Project started in 2003 and it is regarded as one of the pioneering and most innovative European projects on complex systems science and data science. It is promoted and funded by Fondazi...

⏰ Less than two weeks left to apply!
@isi.it & CRT Foundation offer 10 one-year scholarships in data science & AI, applied to: 🩺 public health · 🌍 humanitarian response · 🏙️ urban development · ♻️ sustainability
📅 Deadline: Feb 2, 2026
🔗 Details here: sites.google.com/view/lagrang...

Individual and neighborhood based socioeconomic factors relevant for contact behaviour and epidemic control - Communications Medicine Di Domenico et al. develop a method to reconstruct contact matrices fully stratified by age, education level and socioeconomic position. Results show that accounting for contact assortativity with soc...

Our work about extending contact matrices beyond age, accounting for socio-economic dimensions, is finally published! Here, we analyse social contact data in Switzerland. Happy to see this output from my research period at @ispm.unibe.ch w/ @calthaus.bsky.social

www.nature.com/articles/s43...

1) Due to popular demand, the abstract deadline has been extended to 👉Jan 30👈 -- plz share!

2) We are delighted to announce our keynote speaker --
Taha Yasseri @tahayasseri.bsky.social
Chair of Technology and Society
@ Trinity College Dublin & Technological University Dublin

▶️ cs2italy.org

A grid of images showing SocioPatterns wearable devices, collaborators of the project, proximity graphs, and deployments in museums, hospitals, villages.

Long overdue refresh of the SocioPatterns website! ✨ sociopatterns.org New content & datasets, and a chance to celebrate 17+ years of collabs, ~100 publications, 2000+ studies using our data. Thanks – more ahead! @alainbarrat.bsky.social @wouter-vdb.bsky.social @foolsdelight.bsky.social @isi.it

It's great to be on the front page with so many lovely people :)

I really feel you, Michael. 2026 is packed with important conferences from our community, all in the US, but the idea of traveling there makes me feel uncomfortable.

ICE, Trump’s private army How a federal agency became a paramilitary force, built a parallel prison system, and now answers to the president alone—while Washington lectures Europe on democracy

ICE is no longer an immigration agency.
It is a paramilitary force, backed by a parallel prison system, answerable to the president alone.

What’s happening in the U.S. isn’t a deviation—it’s an infrastructure. And it won’t end with Trump.
civiceconomist.substack.com/p/ice-trumps...

Computational Social Scientists in the Nordics, unite!
🇩🇰🇫🇮🇳🇴🇸🇪🇮🇸

The brand new Nordic Society for CSS welcomes all researchers and practitioners based in the Nordics. The Society will promote student mobility, events, and education initiatives.

Join for free: nosocss.org/join.html.

Submit your abstracts to CS2Italy by 👉 Jan 15 👈
Italian Conference on Computational Social Science
to join us in Turin on May 19-21

We welcome abstract submissions on #computerscience #netsci #complexsystems #sociology #economics #politics #cognitivesci #psychology and more

For more: cs2italy.org

Last week to submit to CS2Italy, the Italian Conference on Computational Social Science.
See you in Torino 19-21 May 2026!
cs2italy.org

Reconstructing the early spatial spread of pandemic respiratory viruses in the United States
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Excited to share a new study published in PNAS! @pnas.org

We reconstructed the early, cryptic spatial spread of 2009 H1N1 influenza and SARS-CoV-2 across US metropolitan areas.

Link👉https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2518051123

#PandemicPreparedness #InfectiousDisease #HumanMobility

If accurate, this raises the question "who is governing Venezuela right now, and tomorrow?" (The answer isn't "Delta Force" or "SEAL Team 6," that's not what they do.) While nearly every state has a presidential line of succession, that may not indicate where power actually lies in coming days.

Comic. [Comment section on a video. 564 comments, including posts from three different avatars: “Who else is here in 2023?” “Is anyone else watching this in 2017?” “Anyone else here in 2025?”] [caption] For some reason, confused time travelers always try to find each other using YouTube comments.

Anyone Else Here

xkcd.com/3188/

Handbook of Computational Social Science cover and authors

ICYMI -- Delighted that the Handbook of Computational Social Science is finally out. Amazing cast of coauthors, with special thanks to @tahayasseri.bsky.social for leading the effort. Happy Holidays!

www.elgaronline.com/edcollbook/b...

PNAS: Perception of own centrality in social networks
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2420334122?af=R