I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where I am part of the AI & Behaviour group. I am also affiliated as an Honorary Lecturer with the Department of Computer Science at the University of Exeter in the UK. Before this, I was a postdoctoral researcher in the Computational Social Science department at the GESIS–Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Germany.
My research spans computational social science, complex systems, network science, and data science. I explore how regularities and social phenomena emerge in different contexts, such as cities and social environments.
I am particularly interested in addressing urgent societal challenges such as urban crime, social inequalities, and human mobility. These challenges often involve complex, interrelated factors, requiring a complex-systems approach to understand and tackle them effectively.
I study human dynamics, such as face-to-face interaction and web browsing behavior, to develop tools and models that address pressing issues like social biases and online privacy, with a focus on human-centered approaches. In another line of research, I also investigate how to explain the behavior of computational swarm intelligence to make swarm-based algorithms more transparent.
News
Research
City science and crime dynamics
Cities bring people together to interact; they can be seen as evolving systems that exhibit a global order built from local-level decisions. Though such local-level processes seem disordered, cities display striking regularities. I am interested in uncovering these regularities and building tools and models to understand urbanization better — in particular, how crime exhibits regularities in its dynamics, structure, and growth.
Human dynamics and network inequality
Though our daily behavior looks sophisticated and unpredictable, research has shown that simple mechanisms can explain parts of our behavior dynamics (e.g., face-to-face interaction, human mobility). I am particularly interested in understanding how these mechanisms drive systemic biases into people's lives, exploring how group interaction can produce social inequalities and how regularities in our behavior make us predictable online and offline.
Computational intelligence
Swarm intelligence refers to the global order that emerges from simple social individuals interacting among themselves. In the past three decades, it has inspired many algorithmic models exhibiting distinct natural social behaviors, such as ant colonies and bird flocks. I investigate how to disentangle the complex behavior of computational swarms and make these algorithms more transparent.
Publications
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Conference
Book chapters
Datasets
Software
Links
Other connections to this page: GitHub, Gist, ResearchGate, and Google Scholar. Also, I am a proud last.fm user — I've been scrobbling for more than ten years. These are the albums I've listened to most in the last three months:
