Luca Rossi
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lrossi.bsky.social
Luca Rossi
@lrossi.bsky.social

I work at IT University of Copenhagen trying to understand online participation and collective action while having fun with methods.
Also Head of the Data Science Section.

Physics 28%
Communication & Media Studies 26%
Pinned
#computationalsocialscience Our work on using VLLMs for semantic visual clustering is out on SSCR: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

There is a lot happening in the space of computational analysis of visual content as we acknowledge more and more the visual nature of contemporary communication.
Sage Journals: Discover world-class research
Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.
journals.sagepub.com

New DFF grant at @itu.dk in the @nerdsitu.bsky.social group! @vedrandzihic.bsky.social will leverage GPS data to understand how climate events affect human mobility!
nerds.itu.dk/2025/11/03/v...
nerds.itu.dk

Reposted by Luca Rossi

@paoloburelli.bsky.social og hans kolleger ved ITU's brAIn Lab arbejder i krydsfeltet mellem digital teknologi og neurovidenskab.

Ved hjælp af kunstig intelligens søger de at skabe en forståelse af, hvordan den menneskelige hjerne fungerer 🧠

www.itu.dk/Om-ITU/Press...
Kan kunstig intelligens forudsige menneskelig adfærd?
Hvad hvis det var muligt at læse hjernen som en bog? Paolo Burelli og hans kolleger ved IT-Universitetets brAIn Lab arbejder i krydsfeltet mellem digital teknologi og neurovidenskab. Den 5. november p...
www.itu.dk
Michelle has been invaluable in that role for nearly a decade now, but the time has come for @aoir.bsky.social to find a new coordinator to take on these vital duties. 2/2

Job posting is on our listserv. Please share & apply! listserv.aoir.org/pipermail/ai...
[Air-L] AoIR is searching for a new Association Coordinator!
listserv.aoir.org

Reposted by Luca Rossi

This will not come as a surprise to any social media or internet researchers.

"Today, the European Commission preliminarily found both TikTok & Meta in breach of their obligation to grant researchers adequate access to public data under the Digital Services Act (#DSA)." ec.europa.eu/commission/p...
Commission preliminarily finds TikTok and Meta in breach of their transparency obligations under the Digital Services Act
Today, the European Commission preliminarily found both TikTok and Meta in breach of their obligation to grant researchers adequate access to public data under the Digital Services Act (DSA).
ec.europa.eu

Reposted by Luca Rossi

For >1yr, I've been part of a @erc.europa.eu pilot to help implement #Article40 #DSA
This isn't just another law, it's key for transparency and democratic oversight
Please join us 22/10, register here⬇️
erc.europa.eu/news-events/events/erc-workshop-data-access-under-digital-services-act-dsa-article
ERC Workshop on data access under the Digital Services Act (DSA) Article 40
The Digital Services Act (DSA) is an European legislation that specifies a set of rules to make the digital space safer and more trustworthy for users.
erc.europa.eu
Over 2 million people across Italy have rallied in more than 100 cities for a one-day general strike.
2 million rally in Italy for Gaza as general strike halts key services
Over 2 million people across Italy have rallied in more than 100 cities for a one-day general strike.
bit.ly

Reposted by Luca Rossi

Three new NERDS publications: Polarization, image-to-text-mapping, and candidate recommendation
nerds.itu.dk/2025/09/30/t...

@lajello.bsky.social is giving his inaugural lecture as full professor at @itu.dk . A story in 3 parts about "how the web failed us". So well deserved.

Reposted by Luca Rossi

ITU er særdeles flot repræsenteret ved #ESA2025 i Warszawa, Europas største konference for algoritmeforskning 👏

👉 Hele 10 pct. af de optagne artikler stammer fra ITU-forskere.

👉 Best Paper Award går til ITU's Eva Rotenberg og Ivor van der Hoog ESA’s for deres arbejde med Dijkstras algoritme.

Reposted by Luca Rossi

This Wednesday, 24 September 2025 at 14:30, our Professor Luca Aiello @lajello.bsky.social will give his inaugural lecture in Auditorium 0 at the IT University in Copenhagen!

en.itu.dk/About-ITU/Pr...
Professor portrait: Luca Aiello wants to make the internet a better place
On 24 September 2025 at 14:30, Professor Luca Aiello will give his inaugural lecture in Auditorium 0 at the IT University in Copenhagen.
en.itu.dk

[…] symbolically aligning their influence and teamwork with the collective efforts needed to address environmental challenges[…]" even without any cleaning the text gives us a clear semantically accurate description of the meaning of the picture that would not be possible otherwise.

"[…] a powerful visual blend of modern celebrity culture with pressing environmental issues, using the popular music group as a metaphorical representation of various solutions to climate change. Each member is labeled with a different aspect of sustainability

fandom dynamics and read the text that goes with it. The actual meaning ("these are the solutions we need for the energy transition") require some cultural work and is hardly connected with the surface features (not even with the text). Gpt4o offered this (shortened) description:

awareness and why it matters.
Take a look at this picture (that we got from a dataset of climate-related activism). This photo is remarkably complex from a cultural point of view, yet very simple in its message. To understand it you need to know who the BTS are, to get an intuition of k-pop

Few days ago I posted about our new article on semantic clustering with VLLMs (here if you missed it journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... ) and I wrote that the method is better than some alternative because it offers cultural awareness and interpretability. Let me explain what I mean by cultural
Critical part of the President's new $100,000 charge for H1-B visas: The Administration can also offer a $100,000 discount to any person, company, or industry that it wants. Replacing rules with arbitrary discretion.

Want visas? You know who to call and who to flatter.

different configurations can affect the results and we are now quite confident that this could be a valuable strategy to consider if you want to computationally study visual data in the context of social sciences.

(e.g. recognising celebrities, symbols etc); 2) having an intermediate textual step allows for an easier interpretability of the clusters that do not need to be visually inspected.

The whole pipeline it's rather complex and contains many moving parts, we've conducted extensive testing of how

clustering images that have the "same meaning" rather than showing the same "surface-level visual features". We show that our proposed approach achieves a considerably higher clustering quality, as well as offering additional positive aspects: 1) VLLM show high level of cultural awareness

Here we present and evaluate a strategy that uses a first step of image description done via VLLM and then clusters the resulting texts via text-embeddings. We also compare this strategy against a traditional CNN-based approach given the task of "semantic clustering" that we define as
Prof. Paul Smaldino @psmaldino.bsky.social will join us in Copenhagen on Wed, Sep 24, 12:30-13:15 to present at an exciting data science seminar!

Topic: Why Use An Evolutionary Perspective To Study Culture?

To attend, see: nerds.itu.dk/event/data-s...

Reposted by Luca Rossi

Roberta Sinatra and Vedran Sekara talk at Rigsrevisionen
nerds.itu.dk/2025/09/18/r...
@robysinatra.bsky.social @vedransekara.bsky.social

I will not stop using my em dashes out of fear of a reviewer accusing me of using AI!

Reposted by Luca Rossi

I'm hiring a postdoc at ITU Copenhagen with experience in NLP, who is keen on improving citizens' experience of health emergency triage in an exciting project with the Danish emergency helpline and the University of Copenhagen. Knowledge of Danish is helpful. candidate.hr-manager.net/ApplicationI...
Citizen-Facing Bidirectional AI for Emergency Triage
The IT University of Copenhagen invites highly motivated individuals to apply for a two year Postdoc position starting in November 2025 or soon thereafter. We i
candidate.hr-manager.net

Reposted by Luca Rossi

Stort tillykke til Marco Carbone, nyudnævnt professor på ITU! 🥂🥳

Marco forsker i softwarekorrekthed og samtidig programmering.

Læs mere om hans forskning her 👇
itu.dk/Om-ITU/Press...
Professorportræt: Det lå i kortene, at Marco Carbone skulle være datalog
Den 19. september 2025 kl. 15.00 holder professor sin tiltrædelsesforelæsning i Auditorium 02 på IT-Universitetet i København.
itu.dk

Just noticed the AIs available in the "AI studio" in Instagram. I understand that meta needs to find a way to justify the tons of money used on GPUs.. but who seriously imagined this could lead to something different from soft porno and cursing characters?

I understand the need to investigate how future techs are perceived by the public and shaped by that perception ... But the consequences of "quantum AI" seems a little bit to much.

Reposted by Luca Rossi

More than 500 researchers have signed an open letter against the dangerous EU proposal on chat control.

The proposal remains ineffective, undoes decades of results in E2E encryption, and threatens the privacy of half a billion citizens.

csa-scientist-open-letter.org/Sep2025
csa-scientist-open-letter.org