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Luca Rossi

@lrossi.bsky.social

1.4K followers 310 following 130 posts

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.

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Physics 28%

Communication & Media Studies 26%

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Luca Rossi @lrossi.bsky.social · 22d

#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

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Reposted by Cas Mudde, Marc Lynch, Patrick A. Jansen , and 12 more Cas Mudde, Marc Lynch, Patrick A. Jansen, Zhang, Tom Shakespeare, Rosemary A. Joyce, Luca Rossi, Kurt Vandaele, Alan Richardson, Dana R. Fisher, Rebecca Zorach, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Nathan P. Kalmoe, Bruce Buchan, James M. Thomas

The Associated Press @apnews.com · 7d

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

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Reposted by Luca Rossi

NERDS @nerdsitu.bsky.social · 10d

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

A memes present in a dataset of a paper. This type of image shows a high level of cultural complexity that cannot be fully interpreted by simply looking at the objects represented in the picture.

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Luca Rossi @lrossi.bsky.social · 16d

@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.

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Reposted by Luca Rossi

IT-Universitetet i København @itu.dk · 18d

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.

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Reposted by Luca Rossi

NERDS @nerdsitu.bsky.social · 19d

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

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Luca Rossi @lrossi.bsky.social · 19d

[…] 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.

Luca Rossi @lrossi.bsky.social · 19d

"[…] 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

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Luca Rossi @lrossi.bsky.social · 19d

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:

Luca Rossi @lrossi.bsky.social · 19d

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

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Luca Rossi @lrossi.bsky.social · 19d

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

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Reposted by Jonathan Portes, Richard S.J. Tol, Colin F. Camerer , and 39 more Jonathan Portes, Richard S.J. Tol, Colin F. Camerer, Richard E. Lenski, Robert N. Stavins, Ashish Arora, Elena Litchman, Joshua S. Weitz, Tom Clark, Bryan D. Jones, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Diane Ravitch, David Rothschild, Luca Rossi, Eric Goldman, Peter Holmes, Juan Cole, Orin S. Kerr, Daniel W. Drezner, Iikka Korhonen, Trevon D. Logan, Karen Benjamin Guzzo, Alan Richardson, David R. Miller, Aaron Sojourner, McKenzie Wark, Holger Hestermeyer, Lesley Bartlett, Jacob T. Levy, Stacy D. VanDeveer, Scott A. Imberman, Robert B. Reich, Elizabeth Stevenson, James Goodwin, Wolfgang Huber, Andrew Rudalevige, Nathan Richardson, Alexandra Cirone, Nicole Guenther Discenza, Prakash Kashwan, Timothy D. McBride, Southern Africa

Justin Wolfers @justinwolfers.bsky.social · 20d

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.

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Luca Rossi @lrossi.bsky.social · 22d

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.

Luca Rossi @lrossi.bsky.social · 22d

(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

Luca Rossi @lrossi.bsky.social · 22d

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

Luca Rossi @lrossi.bsky.social · 22d

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

Reposted by Luca Rossi, Paul E. Smaldino

NERDS @nerdsitu.bsky.social · 22d

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...

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Reposted by Luca Rossi

NERDS @nerdsitu.bsky.social · 22d

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

Audience from back watching a female researcher talk in front of a slide titled "We set to audit the Decision Support (DSS) algorithm"

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Luca Rossi @lrossi.bsky.social · 29d

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

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Reposted by Luca Rossi

Christian Hardmeier @chrha.bsky.social · 29d

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

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Reposted by Luca Rossi

IT-Universitetet i København @itu.dk · Sep 11

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

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Luca Rossi @lrossi.bsky.social · Sep 9

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?

Luca Rossi @lrossi.bsky.social · Sep 9

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

Andrea Basso @andreavbasso.bsky.social · Sep 9

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

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Luca Rossi @lrossi.bsky.social · Sep 9

by an LLM. In many cases having to rely on API calls and external models produces slower, less reliable and less explainable results, not to mention the "cost".

Luca Rossi @lrossi.bsky.social · Sep 9

After some time of dealing with students that work with #LLMs for their projects, I can say that the major problem is that students develop some kind of laziness and they simply prompt their way out of everything. An example are simple data cleaning tasks that now are done (in a less reliable way!)

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Luca Rossi @lrossi.bsky.social · Sep 8

stuff that we know it doesn't work, but also give up on SSH's mission to understand complexity and completely internalise the point of view of CS. At the time when CS fully realises the complexity of the challenges ahead, SSHs are still here jumping "hey we can do a classifier!"

Luca Rossi @lrossi.bsky.social · Sep 8

I'm attending a large European event in #SocialSciences & #Humanities and I'm frankly a little annoyed by the fact that when forced to justify their existence #SSHs seem to point at things like "that project who created a fake news detector now tested in schools". This not only points towards

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Luca Rossi @lrossi.bsky.social · Sep 7

No matter if you're going for a Sunday run, cleaning the house or walking the dog.. everything is better while listening to our Podcast on visual climate communication open.spotify.com/show/1ZwGesM... #climate #podcast #polarvis

From guerrilla tactics to viral content: on the evolution of environmental activism's communication

open.spotify.com

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Reposted by Luca Rossi

Amelie Wuehrl @nlp-amelie.bsky.social · Sep 5

Crowdsourcing datasets is very common, but how much of those results come from LLMs these days? How can we prevent it? Much of it is unclear. This is why we’re conducing a survey (~10 min) to gather community experiences, challenges, and solutions.
Share your thoughts 👉https://tinyurl.com/39ab55wf

Qualtrics Survey | Qualtrics Experience Management

The most powerful, simple and trusted way to gather experience data. Start your journey to experience management and try a free account today.

ugent.qualtrics.com

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