I am an academic researcher, currently a member of the Marc Bloch Centre in Berlin and of its Computational Social Science team . I have a PhD in Computer Science with a specialization in Artificial Intelligence / Complex Systems and a background of interdisciplinary research.
I also have industry experience, which includes working in machine learning at one of the major tech companies and developing software for NASA/JPL.
I see computer science as a real science, and computations as a fundamental aspect of nature, permeating it at many level, from particle physics to sociology. I am particularly interested in the study of social dynamics under this light, especially the new global social phenomena introduced by the Internet: how they create and changes the belief landscapes and cognitive spaces in which we operate.
I like abstractions but I also very much like pratical “hands-on” empirical science. I love creating tools that (hopefully) allow us to observe things under a new light.
A machine learning tool that can be used to discover plausible generators for complex networks. Generators are simple computer programs …
Graphbrain is an Artificial Intelligence open-source software library and scientific research tool. Its aim is to facilitate automated …
The role of recommendation algorithms in online user confinement is at the heart of a fast-growing literature. Recent empirical studies generally suggest that filter bubbles may principally be observed in the case of explicit recommendation (based on user-declared preferences) rather than implicit recommendation (based on user activity). We focus on YouTube which has become a major online content provider but where confinement has until now been little-studied in a systematic manner. Starting from a diverse number of seed videos, we first describe the properties of the sets of suggested videos in order to design a sound exploration protocol able to capture latent recommendation graphs recursively induced by these suggestions. These graphs form the background of potential user navigations along non-personalized recommendations. From there, be it in topological, topical or temporal terms, we show that the landscape of what we call mean-field YouTube recommendations is often prone to confinement dynamics. Moreover, the most confined recommendation graphs i.e., potential bubbles, seem to be organized around sets of videos that garner the highest audience and thus plausibly viewing time.
Existing computational methods for the analysis of corpora of text in natural language are still far from approaching a human level of understanding. We attempt to advance the state of the art by introducing a model and algorithmic framework to transform text into recursively structured data. We apply this to the analysis of news titles extracted from a social news aggregation website. We show that a recursive ordered hypergraph is a sufficiently generic structure to represent significant number of fundamental natural language constructs, with advantages over conventional approaches such as semantic graphs. We present a pipeline of transformations from the output of conventional NLP algorithms to such hypergraphs, which we denote as semantic hypergraphs. The features of these transformations include the creation of new concepts from existing ones, the organisation of statements into regular structures of predicates followed by an arbitrary number of entities and the ability to represent statements about other statements. We demonstrate knowledge inference from the hypergraph, identifying claims and expressions of conflicts, along with their participating actors and topics. We show how this enables the actor-centric summarization of conflicts, comparison of topics of claims between actors and networks of conflicts between actors in the context of a given topic. On the whole, we propose a hypergraphic knowledge representation model that can be used to provide effective overviews of a large corpus of text in natural language.
Networks are a powerful abstraction with applicability to a variety of scientific fields. Models explaining their morphology and growth processes permit a wide range of phenomena to be more systematically analysed and understood. At the same time, creating such models is often challenging and requires insights that may be counter-intuitive. Yet there currently exists no general method to arrive at better models. We have developed an approach to automatically detect realistic decentralised network growth models from empirical data, employing a machine learning technique inspired by natural selection and defining a unified formalism to describe such models as computer programs. As the proposed method is completely general and does not assume any pre-existing models, it can be applied “out of the box” to any given network. To validate our approach empirically, we systematically rediscover pre-defined growth laws underlying several canonical network generation models and credible laws for diverse real-world networks. We were able to find programs that are simple enough to lead to an actual understanding of the mechanisms proposed, namely for a simple brain and a social network.