Luca Maria Aiello

@[email protected]
274 Followers
118 Following
86 Posts
Associate professor of Data Science @ITUkbh Copenhagen, member of @nerdsitu. Formerly @BellLabs, @YahooResearch, @IUBloomington, fellow of @ISI_Fondazione.
Websitehttp://www.lajello.com
Twitterhttps://twitter.com/lajello
Luca Maria AielloApr 1, 2025
NERDSApr 1, 2025
Luca Maria Aiello becomes Full Professor
https://nerds.itu.dk/2025/04/01/luca-maria-aiello-becomes-full-professor/
Congratulations Luca @lajello, well deserved! 🎉👨‍🏫
Luca Maria Aiello becomes Full Professor | NEtwoRks, Data, and Society (NERDS)

Luca Maria AielloMar 11, 2025
NERDSMar 11, 2025
Hear our @lajello, interviewed by @Streetsblog , explain in The Brake podcast the motivation and results of our recent paper on highways and their significance to urban planning, with a "lovely" Italian accent 😄👌
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2025/03/11/how-highways-rend-our-social-fabric-and-the-challenge-of-mending-it
How Highways Rend Our Social Fabric — and the Challenge of Mending It — Streetsblog USA

Roads are supposed to connect us. So why do so many highways tear our social networks apart?

Luca Maria AielloMar 5, 2025
Michael SzellMar 5, 2025

🎉 New paper in PNAS: Urban highways are barriers to social ties
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2408937122

Highways are barriers that cut opportunities for social ties. We quantify this effect by overlaying the US highway network with millions of social ties from Twitter.

Show threadLuca Maria AielloMar 5, 2025
Great collaboration with @anavybor @mszll @sandorjuhasz and and Eszter Bokányi.
Cover image credit Karo Berghuber (Insta: @kariot.lines)
Show threadLuca Maria AielloMar 5, 2025
Reducing social connectivity ultimately harms economic opportunities of lower socioeconomic classes. Therefore, it is important to promote urban restorative initiatives such as the Reconnecting Communities Program by the US DoT (https://www.transportation.gov/reconnecting), recently discontinued by Trump.
Show threadLuca Maria AielloMar 5, 2025
The effect is especially strong at short distances (<5km), persists after controlling for sociodemographic factors and other barriers (e.g., rivers), and is consistent with historical cases of highways that were built to purposefully disrupt or isolate Black neighborhoods.
Luca Maria AielloMar 5, 2025
"Urban Highways Are Barriers to Social Ties" out on PNAS!
The 1st large-scale measure of how highways weaken social connections between the communities they separate.
This barrier effect is strong in the 50 largest US cities and especially for low-income Black communities.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2408937122
Luca Maria AielloFeb 19, 2025
Lucio La CavaFeb 19, 2025

🔥 Are you working on next-gen or alternative social media platforms like #Bluesky or #Mastodon?

👇🏻 This #ICWSM2025 workshop is for you! 😎
📢 https://nextgensocial-workshop.github.io/

📚 We solicit research, position, demo, and dataset paper submissions!
📆 Submissions: March 31, 2025

@computationalsocialscience @networkscience

Nex-Gen and Alternative Social Media @ICWSM2025

Luca Maria AielloFeb 4, 2025
Most tests for LLM biases use questionnaires, asking the model to generate a stance towards a given topic. Sadly, biases can re-emerge when the model is used in the application context. We show that apparently unbiased LLMs exhibit strong biases in conversations.
Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2501.14844
Luca Maria AielloJan 13, 2025
NERDSJan 13, 2025
Meet NERDS 👋 We're 27 researchers at #ITU #copenhagen studying how data, networks, and AI shape society! We use #datascience science to decode everything from social networks to urban systems - and we're big fans of bikes! 🚲
Stay tuned as we share more about the cool stuff we're working on!
https://nerds.itu.dk/
NEtwoRks, Data, and Society (NERDS) | Research group at IT University of Copenhagen