NERDS

3-part photograph: Top left: Smiling young female researcher in black, in front of title slide, Right: PhD Committee: 3 middle-aged researchers and one young researcher, Bottom left: Many colleagues celebrating in a pub

Arianna Pera @ariannapera.bsky.social defends her PhD: The Language of Collective Action in the Social Web
nerds.itu.dk/2026/02/27/a...

Newer, Larger, Better? A Critique of the Unreflective LLM Adoption in Communication Research The growing adoption of large language models (LLMs) in political communication research has prompted excitement but also concern. In this opinion piece, we offer an informed and critical overview ...

🚨📄🚨 LLMs are revolutionizing social and communication science. Tasks that used to require either complex technical skills or abundant resources for crowdsourced solutions, are now easily done with a prompt. While this speeds up research and facilitates
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Talks at NetSI | Clément Sebastiao Leveraging Network Science to Promote a More Just, Sustainable, and Active Mobility

Direct link: www.networkscienceinstitute.org/talks/clemen...

Our Clement is presenting today 16:30 CET - Don't miss him!

Smiling committee and candidate

Luigi defends his PhD: Polarisation in an Evolving Social Media Landscape
nerds.itu.dk/2026/02/12/l...

Big congrats to @luigiarminio.bsky.social who successfully defended his PhD at @itu.dk during the last three years he has done some amazing work to understand online polarization and I'm sure he'll keep doing high quality research.

WE ARE BACK! 🚀🚀🚀

📢 #databeers #copenhagen x Absalon is back on March 10th, SAVE THE DATE!

Many thanks to our sponsors, the Danish Data Science Academy and the Danmarks Tekniske Universitet

Speaker announcement and tickets out soon, stay tuned!

Second news of the day. As part of a stellar group led by @gboccia.bsky.social our FemVision project was funded by @horizoneu.bsky.social in the context of the "CL2-2025-01-DEMOCRACY-05 - Countering and preventing radicalisation, extremism, hate speech and polarisation" call. More will come but

It's time for a few professional updates. Together with the team behind the PolarVis project and with @flxvctr.bsky.social we have been invited by @cais-research.bsky.social to organize three workshops in Bochum. The workshops - between February and May - will expand on our understanding o visual

This week I have started my research visit with @lajello.bsky.social at @nerdsitu.bsky.social. I am looking forward to my time here in Copenhagen. So far the weather has made sure that I feel right at home ☃️

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...

⏳ Final days to apply!

@isi.it in collaboration with Fondazione CRT, offers 10 one-year applied research scholarships in data science & AI, focused on public health, humanitarian response, urban development, and sustainability.

📅 Deadline: February 2nd, 2026

Our recent work (with Veronica Jude, @lajello.bsky.social, and @cerenbudak.bsky.social) on U.S. union Facebook messaging got featured by @poweratwork.bsky.social:
poweratwork.us/the-words-th...

Thanks to Seth Harris and Dane Gambrell for the helpful feedback!

📖 Full paper arxiv.org/abs/2510.01757

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

Co-citation network of the bicycle network literature. Colored nodes and links.

The #bicycle network field has grown so much that there are now papers out analyzing its citation network, haha 😆 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590198225004610

Fun to see how this has evolved! Our nodes are: orozco, szell, vybornova. Several friends also visible 😍

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.

Portrait photo of a smiling young man

Jacob Liam Curran-Sebastian has joined NERDS
nerds.itu.dk/2026/01/02/j...

Portrait photo of a young man with glasses, smiling

Manuel Knepper has joined NERDS
nerds.itu.dk/2026/01/02/m...

Identity improvements to NERDS
nerds.itu.dk/2026/01/01/i...

Happy new year! 🎉

ssh tiny.christmas

a global christmas carol in the terminal :)

I papà di Copenhagen sono diversi - Il Post Per gli italiani che visitano la città è molto evidente: c'entrano i lunghi congedi parentali della Danimarca e in generale dei paesi del nord Europa

With several fresh fathers and Italians in our group, a relevant link to share: www.ilpost.it/2025/12/21/p...

Especially those at the forefront of IT!

Very good. All public institutions, like universities, should follow suit!

Excellent news! Our full paper "The Influence of the Communication Medium on Data Storytelling" based on the thesis of my former master's student Tamara Nagel has been accepted for oral presentation at #chiir2026! See you in Seattle!

More great news: our other full paper "Tip-of-the-Tongue Search in the Wild: Analyzing Human and LLM Performance and Success Factors on Complex Search Requests" was also accepted at #chiir2026, this one together with @maria83.bsky.social, Mark Hall, Marijn Koolen, Mette Skov and Vivien Petras!

Slide reading: Our alrogithms are not yet user-friendly. Innoexplorer solves this: Backend developer streamlines the algorithms, creates usable software; web developers visualize our solutions on a web platform.

Michael, Anastassia and Manuel win Innoexplorer Grant!
nerds.itu.dk/2025/12/11/m...

#kv25 Since I keep reading and reviewing papers using #LLMs to simulate social dynamics I think it's just fair to see how they would do in simulating the outcome of the local elections we had yesterday in #Copenhagen. The plot below shows the "predicted" value obtained via gpt4o

🔈 *Call for Participation* 🔈

Italian Conference on Computational Social Science – CS2Italy
May 19-21, 2026 in Torino, Italy

Premier venue for Computational Social Science in Italy: #sociology #polisci #economics #netsci #complexsystems ++

Submit your abstract by Jan 15: cs2italy.org

plz reshare

Yay, datasci.social is now 3 years old! 🥳
Same as last year, so I don't bother with a new post: https://community.datasci.social/blog/2024-11-15/two-years-old/
stable users - no issues - 99.9+% uptime - muchas gracias to our supporters!! 💖

Only new thing: Given bluesky's predictable moderation […]

A network graph

A short thread of observations using Max Andrew's tool to explore the network of relationships revealed in the Epstein estate email cache. @thatsjustlikeyouropinionman.com
🧵
1. There is a tight inner circle, densely connected. Trump is in the near outer rim.
epstein-doc-explorer-1.onrender.com

Picard management tip: As soon as you find out that a person is truly toxic, get them the hell off your ship.