Citizen Facts Project

Where most initiatives to combat disinformation are limited to denouncing fake news – with the risk of perpetuating an image of citizens as passive and gullible – Citizen Facts relies on collective intelligence. To counter disinformation, but also to promote media education and clean up public debate, Citizen Facts aims to give new impetus to investigative journalism, by combining it with the potential for participation offered by digital technologies.

Read the project presentation

UnMISSeD project

Funded by the European Media and Information Fund of the Gulbenkian Foundation, UnMiSSeD investigates the interaction between science and misinformation. Through a quali-quantitative approach, we examine questions such as: Does scientific information establish a common evidence base for societal debate? Does scientific information lead to convergence or to divergence of opinions? We combine the investigation of a large dataset of tweets around COVID-19 with a “close reading” of how these discussions permeate the porous boundaries of social media.

Read the project presentation

A drama of GERD negotiations

I have collaborated with the  Geneva Water Hub and OuestWare to develop an interactive website to map out the controversy about the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), by investigating the debates that surrounded it at the UN Security Council.

See the website we created

PathOS project

Funded by the EU program WIDERA, PathOS intends to identify and document the multiple ways in which Open Science impact society, including the causal mechanisms linking Open Science policies to their political and societal outcomes and the existing enabling or blocking factors. Impact pathways respond to the need not only to estimate and measure net effects of a policy intervention, but to provide explanations why and how impacts occur. PathOS brings an interdisciplinary team of Open Science experts, infrastructure developers/operators, bibliometrics/scientometrics, data scientists, NLP/ML experts, sociologists, experts in socio-economic impact assessment and policy experts.

See the website project

CultureIA project

Funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR), CulturIA aims to provide a cultural approach to AI, combining methods from the history of science, the history of science, the history of ideas and collective imaginaries with field analyzes. The research hypothesis of the project is the need to understand AI not only as a set of algorithms, but also as a “technoculture” where sciences are inscribed in institutions, but also in situated cultural contexts and in imaginaries involving ideologies, fictions, sensitive representations.

See the website project

ScientIA projet

Funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR), ScientIA aims to analyze, with a comparative perspective, the impacts of the introduction of AI in academic and industrial research. The project is based on an interdisciplinary framework combining computational tools (network science, complex systems methods, AI techniques, modeling, etc.) and social science methods (qualitative interviews and surveys).

See a first set of maps created for the project

Introducing Bibliograph

Developed with the support of the Mission pour les initiatives transverses et interdisciplinaires du CNRS, Bibliograph allows you turn a corpus of scientometrics records from ISI Web of Science or Scopus into a landscape of bibliographic coupling. Such a landscape consists in:

1. A base map network of references co-occurring in the records of the corpus – weighted by the frequency of their co-occurrence;

2. A layer of metadata extracted from the records (e.g. authors, subject areas, keywords) and positioned in the graph according to their co-occurrence with the references of the base map.

Try out the tool

Access to the open-source code

See the slides of a presentation of the tool

 

Drafting an atlas of artificial intelligence’s matters of reflection

To facilitate the exploration of the issues and expertises mobilised by the Global Forum on Artificial Intelligence for Humanity, we have created an atlas of the recent scientific literature on AI for humanity. Starting from a query targeting both the societal implications of AI technologies and the use of AI in human and social sciences, we collected a corpus of more than 23 thousand bibliographic records corresponding to journal articles and conference proceedings published on these topics in the last five years. Using co-citation techniques and force-directed network layout, we created a base map of the relevant scientific literature and use it to locate the keywords, subject areas and institutions appearing in our bibliographic corpus.
The results of this work revealed the great diversity of matters of reflections to be addressed during the Forum (and by the International Panel on AI that it prefigures), but also the seamless connection between technical questions related to advanced techniques of computation of robotics innovation and social and human implications of their implementation.

See the atlas

VOSON Lab Fellow

During my visiting at the Australian National University in Canberra, I’ve been invited to join the VOSON Lab. An opportunity which of course I’ve gladly accepted!

The Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks (VOSON) Lab is located in the Research School of Social Sciences at The Australian National University. We are advancing the Social Science of the Internet through an innovative program of research, research tool development, teaching & research training. We use various terms to describe what we do: web science, network science, computational social science, big data analytics, e-research. The VOSON Lab was formally established in 2005 with an Australian Research Council Special Research Initiative grant. We have been researching online networks since before the era of Facebook and Twitter, and our research has been funded by several ARC grants.

See the lab website

DOOM (systems-theory for the Disorders Of Online Media) project

The project DOOM (systems-theory for the Disorders Of Online Media), which I will be co-leading with Paolo Frasca, has been selected for funding by the CNRS interdisciplinary call for project 80|PRIME. The project includes a scholarship for one PhD student. Get in touch if interested.

Project abstract:
Online social media have a key role in contemporary society and the debates that take place on them are known to shape political and societal trends. For this reason, pathological phenomena like the formation of “filter bubbles” and the viral propagation of “fake news” are observed with concern. The scientific assumption of this proposal is that these information disorders are direct consequences of the inherent nature of these communication media, and more specifically of the collective dynamics of attention thereby. In order to capture these dynamics, this proposal advocates the mathematical modelling of the interplay between the medium (algorithmic component) and the users (human component). The resulting dynamics shall be explored by a system-theoretic approach, using notions such as feedback and stability.

Download the project document

Public Data Lab

I am very proud to introduce the new research network I have recently co-founded with friends and colleagues from all over Europe:

The Public Data Lab (publicdatalab.org) is a network of European researchers working on digital data and public interventions. It seeks to facilitate research, engagement and debate around the future of the data society. We work in collaboration with researchers, practitioners, journalists, civil society groups, designers, developers and public institutions across the world. Our approach characterised by:

  • Intervention around social, political, economic and ecological issues;
  • Participation through involving different publics in the co-design of our work;
  • Artisanship in advancing the craft of developing data projects and experiences;
  • Openness in sharing our research, data and code for all to use.

See our website

INRIA Advanced Research Fellowship

dynamicmodelling

Starting from January 2017 and for three years, I will be the recipient of an advanced research fellowship of INRIA (the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation) and work on social modelling at the Institut des Systèmes Complexes Rhône-Alpes.

Read my research project

EMAPS wins the Etoiles d’Europe prize

Happy to announce that the project EMAPS has won the prize Etoiles d’Europe celebrating the best EU financed research project.

See Climaps.eu the platform developed by EMAPS.

Read an interview about the prize.

Making climate negotiations public

OpenKnowledgeCOP21

An article presenting the work that I have done with the OpenKnowledgeFoundation on the various versions of the UNFCCC COP21 agreement.

Read the article

Climate Negotiations Browser

ClimateNegotiations

On the eve of the UNFCCC COP21, I am proud to introduce our new platform on climate negotiations,

I have worked for more of one year to this platform with the help of the IISD, the médialab of Sciences Po, the LSIR EPFL and the Atelier Iceberg. The platform allows to browse through the contents of the Earth Negotiations Bulletin and contains two interfaces:
– The discover interface providing a few visualizations on the visibility of actors and issues of the UNFCCC negotiations
The explore interface allowing to ask complex questions such as: “give me all the ENB sections in which AOSIS discuss about Loss and Damage after Warsaw

More info here: http://www.medialab.sciences-po.fr/?p=3477

Politiques de la Terre – Politics of the Earth

PolitiquesDeLaTerre

Since the industrial revolution, the Earth may have entered the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch in which humans would be the main actors of the planet changes.  The term Anthropocene indicates a new phase in relations between a planet governed by physical and biological laws – the Earth system – and a set of human societies engaged in conflicting relations of domination governed by economic, social or political laws – the World system. But as this transformation requires rethinking the scales and the dynamics of collective action, it imposes rethink jointly the World and the Earth. Such is the general objective of the “Politics of the Earth” interdisciplinary program.

See the project website

La Fabrique de la Loi

FabriqueDeLaLoi

Unfortunately, I have been involved only indirectly in this project (so far). Yet a great example to showcase to illustrate what quali-quantitative methods and digital datascape navigation mean.

See the project website

 

 

Climaps by EMAPS, A Global Issue Atlas of Climate Change Adaptation

Climaps

Climaps.eu presents the results of the EU research project EMAPS, as well as its process: an experiment to use computation and visualization to harness the increasing availability of digital data and mobilize it for public debate. To do so, EMAPS gathered a team of social and data scientists, climate experts and information designers. It also reached out beyond the walls of Academia and engaged with the actors of the climate debate.

Climaps.eu is an online atlas providing data, visualizations and commentaries about climate adaptation debate. It contains 33 issue-maps and 5 issue-stories guiding the users in the combined reading of several maps. The atlas is addressed to climate experts (negotiators, NGOs and companies concerned by global warming, journalists…) and to citizens willing to engage with the issues of climate adaptation. It employs advanced digital methods to deploy the complexity of the issues related to climate adaptation and information design to make this complexity legible.

See the Climaps Online Atlas

See the Summary for Policy Maker of the Project on the Social Sciences Research Network

Contropedia (Controversy Mapping in Wikipedia)

Contropedia

Funded by the Network of Excellence in Internet Science (EINS) in the call “Disruptive ideas for an Internet Science”, Contropedia aims to build a platform for the real-time analysis and visualization of controversies in Wikipedia. Controversy metrics will be extracted from the activity streams generated by edits to, and discussions about, individual articles and groups of related articles.
In this project, I coordinate the médialab team and provide advice on the rational of controversy mapping.

See the project website

Watch a video presenting Contropedia

Project SOURCE

source

The aim of the SOURCE project is to establish a virtual centre of excellence is to support, stimulate and coordinate European cross-border and cross-sector research on societal security and to integrate this research in the design and implementation of security measures throughout Europe. The centre will thus form the meeting place for and interface between societal and technological design and innovation, industry, and end-user application. The centre will assemble participants from all levels and segments of security research and implementation across Europe.

In this project, I coordinate the activities of the médialab, which are meant to visualize the results of the research of the other partners and to provide a wide range cartography of the online and scientific discussion on security issues in Europe.

See the description of the deliverables of the médialab

FORCCAST

forccast

The FORCCAST (Formation à la Cartographie des Controverses pour l’Analise de Sciences et de Techniques) project is meant to develop and disseminate the teaching method of controversy mapping. The project has received a 8 years funding by the French Government and gathers a growing consortium of national and international universities.

In the project FORCCAST, I am responsible for the coordination of the Axis 1, on the exploration of techno-scientific controversies.

See the project website

DIME-SHS Web

web_mapping

In the framework of the ‘equipment d’excellence’ DIME-SHS, I participate as scientific advisor to the development of a series of tools and methods to exploit web traces for the social sciences.

See the project web-page

MEDEA (Mapping Environmental Debates on Adaptation)


To contribute to understanding the challenges raised by climate change and complement the EMAPS project, MEDEA  is meant develop an online toolkit to map the environmental debate in France. Financed by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (CEP&S call), MEDEA starts under my coordination on November 1st 2011.

Download the project
See the project website

EMAPS (Electronic Maps to Assist Public Science)

picture of a melting glacier
What difference does it makes to be equipped with online tools for mapping technoscientific issues? Can such equipment improve the way we publicly discuss science and technology?

To answer such questions, Bruno Latour and I submitted EMAPS to the EU ‘Science in Society’ call.  Focusing on the web as a tool of collective endeavor, EMAPS aims at engaging the actors involved in climate adaptation debate in an ‘open-air’ experiment on the interactive platform developed within the project. Funded by the European Union Commission, the project starts on November first 2011.

Click here to download the project
See the project website

Il nostro pane quotidiano

eataly

Post-doc research on the sociology of modernization. The project was co-hosted by the Communication Studies Department of the University of Bologna and the Università di Scienze Gastronomiche di Slow Food.

The research analyzed the case of Eataly, an Italian supermarket chain that tries to apply the most modern marketing and distribution techniques to the most traditional food production. Can the distinction between modernity and tradition be overcome?

Download the research report (warning: 8mb file)

MACOSPOL

macospol

My adventure in controversy mapping and my collaboration with Bruno Latour started with the MACOSPOL (MApping COntroversies On Science for POLitics) project, where I worked as an advisor to the Paris team.

See the web-platform delivered by the project

Sciences Po médialab

medialab

Since its foundation in 2009, I have coordinated the research activities of médialab of Sciences Po.

Created by Bruno Latour, the médialab is a laboratory dedicated to digital research. It is a team of specialists bringing together social scientists, engineers and designers. It is a high- tech facility, a hub for vanguard research, a scientific toolkit and a platform for launching national and international collaborations. The médialab’s project has received an A+ evaluation by the French research evaluation Agency.

See the médialab website

Seminare Vento

SeminareVento

PhD research on the sociology of modernization at the University of Milano Bicocca.

The research investigates the tensions connected to the modernization of agriculture by analyzing a series of controversy on biopiracy and the patenting of agro-biodiversity.

Download the research report