Luca Rossi

Luca Rossi

@lrossi.bsky.social

@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

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.

Professor portrait: Luca Aiello wants to make the internet a better place

Reposted by Luca Rossi

NERDS

@nerdsitu.bsky.social

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...

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

[…] 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

"[…] 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

Luca Rossi

@lrossi.bsky.social

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

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

Luca Rossi

@lrossi.bsky.social

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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by Justin Wolfers — Reposted by Luca Rossi, Jonathan Portes, Richard S.J. Tol , and 39 more Luca Rossi, 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, 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

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.

740 4.8K 13K

Luca Rossi

@lrossi.bsky.social

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

(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

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

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

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Luca Rossi

@lrossi.bsky.social

#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.

Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

journals.sagepub.com

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Reposted by Luca Rossi, Paul E. Smaldino

NERDS

@nerdsitu.bsky.social

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

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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Citizen-Facing Bidirectional AI for Emergency Triage

Luca Rossi

@lrossi.bsky.social

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

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...

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

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

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

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.

csa-scientist-open-letter.org

Reposted by Luca Rossi

Andrea Basso

@andreavbasso.bsky.social

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

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Luca Rossi

@lrossi.bsky.social

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".

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Luca Rossi

@lrossi.bsky.social

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

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!"

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Luca Rossi

@lrossi.bsky.social

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