News
2025
2025-09-23: New paper published in PLOS One
In a new paper by Yuan Zhang, Laia Castro, Frank Esser & Alexandre Bovet, we show how a multilevel network approach reveals new patterns of online political selective exposure. We employ a multi-scale community detection approach, utilizing several indices of selective exposure on a dataset collected during the 2022 Brazilian Presidential Election, combined with survey answers. We find that online political selective exposure exhibits a more complex structure than a mere left-right dichotomy. Moreover, depending on the resolution level we consider, we see different associations between network indices of exposure patterns and 189 individual attributes of the survey respondents.
2025-08-29: New paper published in the Network Science journal
Our new paper, Negative ties highlight hidden extremes in social media polarization, is the fruit of a collaboration with Elena Candellone, Shazia A. Bablu, Özgur Togay, and Javier Garcia-Bernardo. In this paper, we reveal how negative interactions in online social networks can help us better understand polarization patterns online using a dataset from the Spanish platform Menéame.
2025-07-21: Talk at IC2S2
Yuan Zhang will present her work on Quantifying the Spread of Online Incivility in Brazilian Politics at the International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2) in Norrköping, Sweden, on July 24th.
2025-05-29: New paper published in the Journal of Physics: Complexity
We have published a new paper in the Machine Learning journal on Community detection on directed networks with missing edges. In this work, we extend the recently developed Flow Stability framework to address the problem of community detection in weighted, directed networks with missing links. Our approach leverages known uncertainty levels in nodes' out-degrees to enhance the robustness of community detection based on modeling random walk flows in networks.
2025-06-17: Two talks at ICWSM 2025
We will be giving two talks at the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media in Copenhagen, Danemark:
Monday, June 23: Why Academics Are Leaving Twitter for Bluesky by Alexandre Bovet at the Next-Gen and Alternative Social Media Workshop.
Thursday, June 26: Quantifying the Spread of Online Incivility in Brazilian Politics by Yuan Zhang at Session 27: Virality and Political Coordination.
2025-06-12: Best Student Paper Award at the 2025 satellite "Networks in the Science of Science" awarded to Dorian Quelle
Congratulations to Dorian Quelle, who was awarded the Best Student Paper award at the Networks in the Science of Science satellite at NetSci 2025 for his presentation of the paper "Why Academics Are Leaving Twitter for Bluesky" by Dorian Quelle, Frederic Denker, Prashant Garg, and Alexandre Bovet.
2025-06-06: Best Student Poster Award at NetSci 2025 awarded to Yuan Zhang
Congratulations to Yuan Zhang, who was awarded the Best Student Post award at the NetSci 2025 for her poster on her work on "Quantifying the Spread of Online Incivility in Brazilian Politics" done in collaboration with Michael Amsler, Laia Castro Herrero, Frank Esser, Alexandre Bovet, and published in ICWSM 2025.
2025-06-04: Open postdoctoral position in Machine Learning/NLP for Media Monitoring
The Quantitative Network Science group at the Department of Mathematical Modeling and Machine Learning (DM3L) of the University of Zurich (UZH) invites applications for a Postdoctoral Researcher position to join our team. The initial appointment will be for two years.
The appointed researcher will join a DIZH-funded project developing digital tools for media monitoring and discourse analysis. In collaboration with journalism and linguistics experts at ZHAW and practice-oriented media partners, the project combines journalism, complex systems theory, applied linguistics, and machine learning to analyze how different perspectives (e.g., scientific, political, legal, moral, economical) are linked in media coverage of issues like climate change, migration, energy or political voting in Switzerland. The goal is to measure and visualize how journalists frame complex topics.
Apply here.
2025-05-29: New paper published in the Machine Learning journal
We published a new paper in the Machine Learning journal on Graph spring neural ODEs for link sign prediction. This work started as Andrin Rehmann's student project in my Complex Networks course. His initial idea was to model signed networks with attracting and repelling springs to predict the sign of unknown links. We continued working on it using neural networks instead of springs and neural ODEs to simulate the dynamics. This novel method achieves results that are close to the state of the art while being significantly faster.
2025-05-20: New paper accepted at ICWSM 2025
We have a new paper accepted at the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media on Quantifying the Spread of Online Incivility in Brazilian Politics by Yuan Zhang, Michael Amsler, Laia Castro Herrero, Frank Esser, Alexandre Bovet. You can find it here.
2025-05-08: Talk at the GPSC Symposium at Leiden University
Yasaman Asgari is giving an invited talk at the Government Policies and Scientific Collaboration Symposium organized at the University of Leiden on her work on the Arab Spring's Impact on Science through the Lens of Scholarly Attention, Funding, and Migration.
2025-04-11: We are going to NetSci 2025!
We have several accepted contributions at NetSci2025. Come see our work if you are in Maastricht in June:
Yasaman Asgari: "Multiscale Temporal Node Assortativity in Feature-rich Temporal Networks" (Oral) and "From Revolution to Research: Interplay Between Funding, Migration, and Scholarly Attention post-Arab Spring" (Oral at the NetSciSci satellite).
Dorian Quelle: "Blue Skies, Red Lines: Mapping Political Debate Networks on Bluesky" (Poster) and "The Twitter/X-odus: Quantifying the forces behind the academic platform migration to Bluesky" (Oral at the NetSciSci satellite).
Yuan Zhang: "Quantifying the Spread of Online Incivility in Brazilian Politics" (Poster) and "More than 'Left and Right': Revealing Multilevel Online Political Selective Exposure" (Oral at the UNCSS satellite).
Samuel Koovely: "Entropy-Informed Dynamic Community Detection" (Oral).
Alexandre Bovet: Invited talk at the UNCSS satellite and "Flow Stability, a python package for dynamic community detection in temporal networks" (Oral at the NASCol satellite).
Two of our collaborations have also been accepted as oral presentations: "Political Polarization Patterns on Bluesky: Understanding Political Discussion in an Emerging Social Platform" by Ali Salloum and "Negative Ties Highlight Hidden Extremes in Social Media Polarization" by Shazia Ayn Babul.
2025-03-17: New paper in EPJ Data Science
New paper on the prevalence and dynamics of multilingual misinformation through an analysis of 264,487 fact-checks spanning 95 languages. Lost in translation: using global fact-checks to measure multilingual misinformation prevalence, spread, and evolution in EPJ Data Science by Dorian Quelle, Calvin Yixiang Cheng, Alexandre Bovet, and Scott A. Hale.
2025-03-17: New preprint on the Arab Spring's Impact on Science
New preprint on our analysis of 25 million articles revealing the Arab Spring's Impact on Science through the Lens of Scholarly Attention, Funding, and Migration by Yasaman Asgari, Hongyu Zhou, Ozgur Kadir Ozer, Rezvaneh Rezapour, Mary Ellen Sloane and Alexandre Bovet.
2025-03-11: New paper accepted at ACM-CHI 2025
Our paper Effective Yet Ephemeral Propaganda Defense: There Needs to Be More than One-Shot Inoculation to Enhance Critical Thinking by Nicolas Hoferer, Kilian Sprenkamp, Dorian Christoph Quelle, Daniel Gordon Jones, Zoya Katashinskaya, Alexandre Bovet and Liudmila Zavolokina has been accepted as a late breaking work at the ACM-CHI 2025 conference. This paper is a result of our DIZH funding to create an AI-assisted propaganda detection tool.
2025-02-20: Talk at the Oxford Workshop on Temporal and Dynamic Interactions
Samuel Koovely will give a talk at the Oxford Workshop on Temporal and Dynamic Interactions on his work on entropy-informed dynamic community detection.
2025-02-26: New paper about Bluesky in PLOS One
New paper on Bluesky's Network topology, polarization, and algorithmic curation in PLOS One by Dorian Quelle and Alexandre Bovet. Read the press release and Dorian's interview in El País.
2025-01-09: New preprint on signed networks and online polarization
New preprint on analyzing online polarization in signed networks: Negative Ties Highlight Hidden Extremes in Social Media Polarization by Elena Candellone, Shazia'Ayn Babul, Özgür Togay, Alexandre Bovet and Javier Garcia-Bernardo.
2024
2024-12-17: New preprint on Neural ODEs for link sign prediction
New preprint on a novel machine learning method for link sign prediction: Graph Spring Neural ODEs for Link Sign Prediction Andrin Rehmann and Alexandre Bovet.
2024-10-25: New preprint on community detection with missing data
New preprint on a novel method for Community detection on directed networks with missing edges Nicola Pedreschi, Renaud Lambiotte and Alexandre Bovet.
2024-08-30: We are going to CCS 2024!
Our group will give a keynote and three talks at the Complex Systems Conference 2024 in Exeter. Alexandre Bovet: keynote at the CSS@CCS satellite and talk at the FRIENDS satellite. Yasaman Asgari: talks at the CRAB satellite and the science of science session.
2024-08-07: New preprint on multilevel selective exposure
New preprint on measuring multilevel online political selective exposure by Yuan Zhang, Laia Castro Herrero, Frank Esser and Alexandre Bovet.
2024-06-01: We are going to NetSci 2024!
Our group will have three talks and one poster at the flagship conference of the Network Science Society, NetSci2024 at Quebec City in Canada. Samuel Koovely: Information-theoretic framework for the dynamics of temporal networks (talk at the temporal networks session). Yuan Zhang: Measuring Hierarchical Echo Chambers of Brazilian Political Communities (talk social networks session). Dorian Quelle: Birds of a Feather Block Each Other: Understanding Intra-Community Selective Avoidance (talk social networks). Nicola Pedreschi: Flow stability for community detection on weighted, directed networks with missing edges (poster).
2024-04-10: New paper on suspended accounts in Twitter in EPJ Data Science
New paper on the role suspended Twitter accounts aligning with the Internet Research Agency misinformation campaign to influence the 2016 US election in EPJ Data Science by Matteo Serafino, Zhenkun Zhou, José S. Andrade Jr., Alexandre Bovet, and Hernán A. Makse.
2024-02-07: New papers on fact-checking with LLMs in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence
New paper on the perils and promises of fact-checking with large language models in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence by Dorian Quelle and Alexandre Bovet. Check the news coverage in Le Soleil (CA).
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