652 citations · 1.9k across the 68 of their papers we have counts for
30 papers · 1 filter
Billions of Sketches Reveal Hidden Cultural Variation in Human Concepts
Arianna Pera, Mauro Martino, Nima Dehmamy +3
Claims about the universality of human concepts have been predominantly assessed through linguistic similarity across languages and cultures. However, words are effective as commun…
AI Persuasive Framing in Collective Dilemmas
Anders Giovanni Møller, Alessia Galdeman, Arianna Pera +1
AI agents are promising tools that can act as flexible behavioral nudges to enhance human cooperation in addressing large-scale societal problems. However, evidence on whether AI a…
Auditing the Reliability of Multimodal Generative Search
Erfan Samieyan Sahneh, Luca Maria Aiello
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) increasingly function as generative search systems that retrieve and synthesize answers from multimedia content, including YouTube videos.…
Overreliance on AI in Information-seeking from Video Content
Anders Giovanni Møller, Elisa Bassignana, Francesco Pierri +1
The ubiquity of multimedia content is reshaping online information spaces, particularly in social media environments. At the same time, search is being rapidly transformed by gener…
Measuring Narrative Polarization in Online Discourse
Jan Elfes, Marco Bastos, Luca Maria Aiello
Polarization research has demonstrated how people cluster in homogeneous groups with opposing opinions. However, this effect emerges not only through interaction between people, li…
Framing Unionization on Facebook: Communication around Representation Elections in the United States
Arianna Pera, Veronica Jude, Ceren Budak +1
Digital media have become central to how labor unions communicate, organize, and sustain collective action. Yet little is known about how unions' online discourse relates to concre…
Causal Modeling of Climate Activism on Reddit
Jacopo Lenti, Luca Maria Aiello, Corrado Monti +1
Climate activism is crucial in stimulating collective societal and behavioral change towards sustainable practices through political pressure. Although multiple factors contribute…
Prompt Refinement or Fine-tuning? Best Practices for using LLMs in Computational Social Science Tasks
Anders Giovanni Møller, Luca Maria Aiello
Large Language Models are expressive tools that enable complex tasks of text understanding within Computational Social Science. Their versatility, while beneficial, poses a barrier…
Nicer Than Humans: How do Large Language Models Behave in the Prisoner's Dilemma?
Nicoló Fontana, Francesco Pierri, Luca Maria Aiello
The behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs) as artificial social agents is largely unexplored, and we still lack extensive evidence of how these agents react to simple social stim…
Narratives of Collective Action in YouTube's Discourse on Veganism
Arianna Pera, Luca Maria Aiello
Narratives can be powerful tools for inspiring action on pressing societal issues such as climate change. While social science theories offer frameworks for understanding the narra…
The Persuasive Power of Large Language Models
Simon Martin Breum, Daniel Vædele Egdal, Victor Gram Mortensen +2
The increasing capability of Large Language Models to act as human-like social agents raises two important questions in the area of opinion dynamics. First, whether these agents ca…
Shifting Climates: Climate Change Communication from YouTube to TikTok
Arianna Pera, Luca Maria Aiello
Public discourse on critical issues such as climate change is progressively shifting to social media platforms that prioritize short-form video content. Content creators acting on…
The role of interface design on prompt-mediated creativity in Generative AI
Maddalena Torricelli, Mauro Martino, Andrea Baronchelli +1
Generative AI for the creation of images is becoming a staple in the toolkit of digital artists and visual designers. The interaction with these systems is mediated by \emph{prompt…
Measuring Online Behavior Change with Observational Studies: a Review
Arianna Pera, Gianmarco de Francisci Morales, Luca Maria Aiello
Exploring online behavior change is imperative for societal progress in the context of 21st-century challenges. We analyze 148 articles (2000-2023) focusing on behavior change in t…
Dream Content Discovery from Reddit with an Unsupervised Mixed-Method Approach
Anubhab Das, Sanja Šćepanović, Luca Maria Aiello +3
Dreaming is a fundamental but not fully understood part of human experience that can shed light on our thought patterns. Traditional dream analysis practices, while popular and aid…
Drivers of social influence in the Twitter migration to Mastodon
Lucio La Cava, Luca Maria Aiello, Andrea Tagarelli
The migration of Twitter users to Mastodon following Elon Musk's acquisition presents a unique opportunity to study collective behavior and gain insights into the drivers of coordi…
The language of opinion change on social media under the lens of communicative action
Corrado Monti, Luca Maria Aiello, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales +1
Which messages are more effective at inducing a change of opinion in the listener? We approach this question within the frame of Habermas' theory of communicative action, which pos…
Urban form and COVID-19 cases and deaths in Greater London: an urban morphometric approach
Alessandro Venerandi, Luca Maria Aiello, Sergio Porta
The COVID-19 pandemic generated a considerable debate in relation to urban density. This is an old debate, originated in mid 19th century's England with the emergence of public hea…
The Healthy States of America: Creating a Health Taxonomy with Social Media
Sanja Scepanovic, Luca Maria Aiello, Ke Zhou +2
Since the uptake of social media, researchers have mined online discussions to track the outbreak and evolution of specific diseases or chronic conditions such as influenza or depr…
How Epidemic Psychology Works on Twitter: Evolution of responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S
Luca Maria Aiello, Daniele Quercia, Ke Zhou +3
Disruptions resulting from an epidemic might often appear to amount to chaos but, in reality, can be understood in a systematic way through the lens of "epidemic psychology". Accor…
Ten Social Dimensions of Conversations and Relationships
Minje Choi, Luca Maria Aiello, Krisztian Zsolt Varga +1
Decades of social science research identified ten fundamental dimensions that provide the conceptual building blocks to describe the nature of human relationships. Yet, it is not c…
FaceLift: A transparent deep learning framework to beautify urban scenes
Sagar Joglekar, Daniele Quercia, Miriam Redi +3
In the area of computer vision, deep learning techniques have recently been used to predict whether urban scenes are likely to be considered beautiful: it turns out that these tech…
The Language of Dialogue Is Complex
Alexander Robertson, Luca Maria Aiello, Daniele Quercia
Integrative Complexity (IC) is a psychometric that measures the ability of a person to recognize multiple perspectives and connect them, thus identifying paths for conflict resolut…
Large-scale and high-resolution analysis of food purchases and health outcomes
Luca Maria Aiello, Rossano Schifanella, Daniele Quercia +1
To complement traditional dietary surveys, which are costly and of limited scale, researchers have resorted to digital data to infer the impact of eating habits on people's health.…