News archive – Updates and media coverage

Noteworthy updates from the group.

Jan 2025
📄 The paper Linking Across Data Granularity: Fitting Multivariate Hawkes Processes to Partially Interval-Censored Data by Pio, Alex and Andrei was published in the prestigious IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems. This work advances how we can model data with varying time granularity!
Jan 2025
📄 The paper Behavioral Homophily in Social Media via Inverse Reinforcement Learning: A Reddit Case Study by Frankie, Philipp Schneider and Andrei was accepted at The Web Conference 2025 (WWW). This study uses inverse reinforcement learning to uncover how user behaviors can reveal connection patterns that traditional topic analysis misses!
Jan 2025
📄 The paper Before It's Too Late: A State Space Model for the Early Prediction of Misinformation and Disinformation Engagement by Lin, Emily and Andrei was accepted at The Web Conference 2025 (WWW) in the Web4Good track. Check out the interactive dashboard showcasing the approach to early detection of problematic content!
Nov 2024
📄 The paper Detecting Extreme Ideologies in Shifting Landscapes: an Automatic & Context-Agnostic Approach by Rohit and Andrei together with collaborators from Flinders University and DSTG just got accepted at ICWSM'25. Their work offers a practical pipeline for detecting ideological signals in social media! Looking forward to presenting in beautiful Copenhagen!
Sep 2024
🏆 Andrei was a finalist for the 2024 Department of Defence Eureka Prize for Outstanding Science in Safeguarding Australia! The Australian Museum Eureka Prizes ceremony was held at Sydney Town Hall, recognizing Andrei's groundbreaking work on detecting harmful information online while preserving free speech. This follows his win of the Excellence Award and Academic of the Year at the 2023 Australian Defence Industry Awards. Congrats, but next time make sure you actually win it!
Aug 2024
📄 The paper Empirically measuring online social influence by Rohit and Andrei was published in the journal EPJ Data Science. Great job!
Jul 2024
📄 The paper Generalizing hate speech detection using multi-task learning: A case study of political public figures by Frankie and Andrei was published in the journal Computer Speech & Language. Congrats!
Jun 2024
🏆 What a fabulous night at the Defence and National Security Workforce Awards, celebrating Emily‘s successes and recognition. Emily was a finalist in the category Best Female Technical Specialist under 35, for her work on understanding and countering online misinformation! It was so good having UTS’ Vice-Chancellor Andrew Parfitt and Pro-Vice-Chancellor Research Chris Turney cheer with us!! Check out some photos from the night.
May 2024
📄 The paper What Drives Online Popularity: Author, Content or Sharers? Estimating Spread Dynamics with Bayesian Mixture Hawkes by Pio and Andrei was accepted at ECML-PKDD'24: Proceedings of the European Conference on Machine Learning and Data Mining. Safe travels to Vilnius, Lithuania!
May 2024
Lin joined the Behavioral Data Science as a Research Associate (postdoc). Welcome Lin!
Feb 2024
📄 The paper Harmony in the Australian Domain Space by Elaine, Andrei and colleagues from the University of New South Wales and Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy, was accepted for publication in WEBSCI ‘24: Proceedings of the 16th ACM Web Science Conference. Congrats, Elaine!
Dec 2023
📄 The paper Conspiracy, Misinformation, Radicalisation: Understanding the online pathway to indoctrination and opportunities for intervention by Emily, Jooyoung, Andrei and colleagues from the University of California Berkeley was published in the Journal of Sociology. Great job!
Oct 2023
📄 The paper Transfer learning for hate speech detection in social media by Frankie, Andrei and colleagues from the Australian National University was published in the Journal of Computational Social Science. Congrats, Frankie!
Oct 2023
📄 The paper The Innovation-to-Occupations Ontology: Linking Business Transformation Initiatives to Occupations and Skills by Daniela, Andrei and colleagues from the UTS Data Science Institute and from Data61 CSIRO was accepted with the Australasian Conference on Information Systems (ACIS'23). Good job, Daniela!
Sep 2023
🏆 Andrei was awarded the top Defence Industry Award 2023, for the Academic of the Year and the Excellence Award. See media coverage. Not too bad!
Sep 2023
📄 The paper The Science of Startups: The Impact of Founder Personalities on Company Success by Paul McCarthy, Elaine Gong, Andrei and colleagues from the University of Oxford and University of Melbourne was accepted by Nature's Scientific Reports. The paper unveils novel insights into the factors that contribute to startup success.
Aug 2023
📄 The paper Inclusive and Explainable AI Systems: A Systematic Literature Review by Amelie, Andrei and colleagues from Data61 CSIRO was accepted with the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'23). Good job, Amelie!
Aug 2023
📄 Our work about the moderating harmful online content and the effectiveness of the EU Digital Services Act was published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Checkout the paper The effectiveness of moderating harmful online content by Philipp Schneider (from EPFL) and Andrei.
Aug 2023
🏆 Andrei is honoured to be a finalist for the Australian Defence Industry Awards 2023, category Academic of the Year, for his work on detecting and counting the spread of mis- and disinformation and its weaponized counterparts – information and influence operations.
Jul 2023
📄 The paper Opinion Market Model: Stemming Far-Right Opinion Spread using Positive Interventions by Pio, Rohit and Andrei just got accepted in the 18th International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM'24). See the full research blog!
Jul 2023
Huge congrats to Dima for getting his paper paper ‘Enhancing Biomedical Text Summarization and Question-Answering: On the Utility of Domain-Specific Pre-Training’ accepted in the BioASQ workshop, collocated with the CLEF 2023 conference. Enjoy Thessaloniki, Dima!
Apr 2023
📄 The paper ‘Riding information crises: The performance of far-right Twitter users in Australia during the 2019-20 bushfires and the COVID-19 pandemic’ by Andrei together with digital communication collaborators Francesco Bailo and Amelia Johns just got accepted in the prestigious journal Information, Communication & Society.
Feb 2023
Detecting online radicalisation early could help prevent far-right ideology-motivated (and potentially violent) activity! Check out Rohit‘s and Andrei‘s article that just appeared in The Conversation: Can ideology-detecting algorithms catch online extremism before it takes hold?. See the full research blog!
Jan 2023
📄 The paper ‘Interval-censored Transformer Hawkes: Detecting Information Operations using the Reaction of Social Systems’ by Quyu, Pio, Rohit and Andrei together with a colleague from Olga Boichak from the University of Sydney, just got accepted in The Web Conference 2023 (WWW), the flagship conference of Web Research.
Jan 2023
📄 The paper Predicting Relationship Labels and Individual Personality Traits from Telecommunication History in Social Networks using Hawkes Processes by Andrei together with colleagues from Wrocław University of Science and Technology (Poland) and University of California Los Angeles, just got accepted in impactful Computer Science journal IEEE Access (Google H5=200).
Nov 2022
📄 The paper Interval-censored Hawkes processes by Andrei, Alex and Pio, together with colleagues from ANU and Google, just got accepted in the flagship theoretical Machine Learning journal Journal of Machine Learning Journal.
Nov 2022
Rohit and Andrei presented at the Defence Human Sciences Symposium 2022 (DHSS'22) in the session “Human sciences in the Grey Zone”, the talk “Data-Driven Ideology Detection: A case study of far-right extremism“. Check the recording here.
Sep 2022
Andrei published a The Conversation piece on LinkedIn's experiment linking weak ties to labour modiblity, and gave radio interviews on Radio Adelaide and ABC Tasmania.
Jul 2022
Andrei was interviewed by SAGE Research Methods for the Doing Online Research case study collection. Check out the blogpost and video
Jul 2022
Join us in fighting online misinformation! We have multiple funded PhD positions available for (computational) social scientists, applied statisticians and machine learning & data scientists. Get in touch.
Jul 2022
Two 1-Year Postdoc available in detecting and modelling mis-/dis-information spread. If you are interested in working with us, please get in touch.
May 2022
Check-out the presentation video for our paper Slipping to the Extreme: A Mixed Method to Explain How Extreme Opinions Infiltrate Online Discussions, soon to be presented at ICWSM'22.
Apr 2022
📄 The paper “Skills Taught vs Skills Sought: Using Skills Analytics to Identify the Gaps between Curriculum and Job Markets”, together with Connected Intelligence Centre (CIC) colleagues Alireza Ahadi, Kirsty Kitto, Kaska Musial was accepted in Educational Data Mining 2022.
Feb 2022
Amelie Girard started today her PhD on how to bridge the gap between ML prediction, and explaining decisions (say in a marketing, consulting or HR context). Welcome, Amelie!
Feb 2022
Daniela Elia started today her PhD on augmenting skill and occupational ontologies with the demand on the employer's side. Welcome, Daniela!
Nov 2021
📄 The paper Slipping to the Extreme: A Mixed Method to Explain How Extreme Opinions Infiltrate Online Discussions by Quyu and Andrei and collaborators from the School of Communication @UTS just got accepted in 16th International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM'22).
Sep 2021
Frankie Yuan started today his PhD on building detection models for online problematic speech (disinformation, misinformation, and hate speech). Welcome, Frankie!
Sep 2021
Andrei presented at the European Communication Conference (ECREA’21) in the session “Coordinated Inauthentic Behaviour in Social Media: New Methods and Findings”, the paper “Discovering the Strategies of Coordinated Disinformation via Hawkes Intensity Processes“. Check the blogpost and recording here.
Aug 2021
The Behavioral Data Science lab has a PhD opportunity available. If you are interested in working with us, please get in touch.
Aug 2021
The Conversation just published an article covering our PLOS ONE paper on how AI can help choose your next career. The research also made the headlines of the World Economic Forum, LinkedIn News Australia, The Mandarin and Phys.org.
Jul 2021
📄 The paper Skill-driven recommendations for job transition pathways by Nik and Andrei just got accepted in PLOS ONE. Perfect timing for a labour transitions solution, given the new lockdowns!
Apr 2021
The Conversation just published an article covering our PLOS ONE paper on the evolution of diversity and dominance. The UTS and UNSW newsrooms also covered the work in a press release.
Mar 2021
📄 The paper Evolution of diversity and dominance of companies in online activity by economists and evolutionary biologists at UNSW, and Andrei as senior author just got accepted in PLOS ONE. This concludes a project in the making since July 2016 (almost 5 years!).
Mar 2021
📄 Andrei‘s paper Using Hawkes Processes to model imported and local malaria cases in near-elimination settings (together with collaborators at the Imperical College of London) just got accepted in PLOS Computational Biology.
Mar 2021
Pio Calderon joins the group. He starts his PhD studying cross-platform partially observed information spread, local influencers and popularity on social media. Welcome, Pio!
Feb 2021
Four Honours students joined Behavioral Data Science. Welcome Frankie, Duy, Andrew and Tom!
Feb 2021
Check our videos for demonstrating the tools, Birdspotter and evently! They will be presented at WSDM'21.
Jan 2021
📄 Andrei‘s paper Linking User Opinion Dynamics and Online Discussions (together with French collaborators Christine Largeron and Andrei Mardale) just got accepted in IDA'21. Check out its presentation video.
Jan 2021
Nik just submitted his PhD thesis today! This is the completion of a great journey. Congrats!
Jan 2021
📄 Nik‘s and Andrei‘s paper Layoffs, Inequity and COVID-19: A Longitudinal Study of the Journalism Jobs Crisis in Australia from 2012 to 2020 (together with Sasha Molitorisz and Peter Fray) just got accepted in the prestigious journal Journalism.
Dec 2020
📄 Two demo papers accepted for WSDM'21! Rohit and Quyu, each had a demo paper accepted for presentation, describing their libraries BirdSpotter and evently, respectively. Congrats!
Nov 2020
Nik (and Andrei) gave an invited talk at the Reserve Bank of Australia on career transitions and managing labour supply and demand.
Nov 2020
📄 Nik will present his paper Predicting Skill Shortages in Labor Markets: A Machine Learning Approach at the Workshop on Human-in-the-Loop Methods and Future of Work in BigData – HMData'20 collocated with BigData'20. Congrats Nik!
Oct 2020
Andrei gave an interview on the Panorama radio show about the ways misinformation spreads through social media and how it affects consumers. Panorama is the flagship news and current affairs show of the youth-run SYN Media, broadcasting from Melbourne.
Oct 2020
Dima Galat joins the group. He will be undertaking his PhD research on cognitive bias detection from text, with an application to detecting and countering mis- and dis-information. Welcome Dima!
Sep 2020
Andrei won the PitchFest organised by the NSW Smart Sensing Network and Klarrio with an idea of detection of disinformation campaigns in social media. Next, developing a prototype with Klarrio.
Aug 2020
📄 Quyu will present his paper Describing and Predicting Online Items with Reshare Cascades via Dual Mixture Self-exciting Processes at CIKM 2020. Congrats Quyu!
Jul 2020
😄 Behavioral Data Science's website is up!