Quantitative understanding of success and inequality through network science
The crucial role of network science in comprehending social phenomena
Roberta Sinatra: Quantitative understanding of success and inequality through network science
When: June 12 at 11p.m.
Where: Room M104 at RU
This talk is part of the Valkyrja Distinguished Lecture Series and of the talks for CS@RU 25. The unprecedented availability of large-scale datasets on human activities and interactions has enabled us to quantitatively understand how networks shape success and drive inequalities in various fields.
In this talk, I will highlight the crucial role of network science in comprehending social phenomena, particularly in the realms of art and science. Specifically, I will present a series of findings on the evolution of careers in the arts, utilizing a random walk model that successfully predicts artists' success even twenty years into the future. I will then shift my focus to the COVID-19 pandemic and the advent of Large Language models, discussing how they have amplified network inequalities in science. Through these examples, I will demonstrate the importance of network science in measuring, predicting, and designing algorithms for social phenomena.
Roberta Sinatra is Professor in Computational Social Science at the University of Copenhagen, and holds visiting positions at IT University of Copenhagen (ITU), ISI Foundation (Turin, Italy) and Complexity Science Hub (Vienna, Austria). She co-founded the NEtwoRks, Data, and Society (NERDS) Research group at ITU and is a co-lead of the Pioneer centre for AI in Copenhagen. Her research is at the forefront of network science, data science, and computational social science. Roberta did her BSc, MSc and PhD in Physics at the University of Catania, Italy. Her research has been published in top-tier venues like Nature and Science, and has been featured in The New York Times, Forbes, The Economist, The Guardian, The Washington Post, among other major media outlets. Her research has been awarded the Complex Systems Society Junior prize, the DPG Young Scientist Award for Socio- and Econophysics, and a Villum Young Investigator grant.
