News

Íris Damião, from SPAC, Receives Fulbright Research Award at the University of Vermont

Íris Damião, a PhD student at SPAC, has been awarded a Fulbright Research Grant to carry out her research at the University of Vermont. Her work explores algorithmic biases, focusing on search engines and large language models, and examines how these technologies shape the contemporary information ecosystem. She is particularly interested in whether, and in what ways, these systems present biased or personalized information, and how this can reinforce users’ beliefs and perspectives on controversial or sensitive topics such as elections or international conflicts.

Jacopo Carotenuto successfully defended his master thesis today!

He presented his work entitled "Dynamics of information spread in online social systems: a Twitter-based study", and concluded his MSc in Physics of Data at University of Padova (Università degli studi di Padova).

Paulo Almeida, from SPAC, co-hosts a tutorial on the implementation of the Digital Services Act, at ECML-PKDD 2025

On September 19, Paulo Almeida, research technician, co-hosted a tutorial at the ECML-PKDD conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery.

SPAC in the 11th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2) – Norrköping, Sweden

From July 22 to 24, two researchers from SPAC, Íris Damião and Cristina Mendonça, took part in the 11th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2), held in Norrköping, Sweden.

Tiago Miranda, from SPAC, presents a poster at LxMLS 2025 as part of the HealthDisrupt project

On July 22, Tiago Miranda, research technician, presented a poster at the Lisbon Machine Learning School (LxMLS) 2025 entitled “Inferring diagnostics from prescription data: a machine learning approach”.

SPAC PhD Student Íris Damião Awarded 3rd Place in 3 Minute Thesis Competition from Universidade de Lisboa

The third edition of this dynamic science communication competition brought together more than 100 candidates, with 12 finalists competing for the top three places at the Pavilhão de Portugal. Íris presented her work on political biases in search engines and in new generative artificial intelligence tools, showing how she studies them and highlighting the impact that these technologies—used daily by millions of people—can have on the formation of opinions and even on voting decisions.

SPAC Members connect at group lunch

On May 15, the SPAC team came together for a social lunch, providing a relaxed moment and an opportunity for colleagues to connect. These gatherings are always an excellent chance to share experiences, strengthen collaboration, and celebrate team spirit.

SPAC member Tomás Estrôncio defended is MSc thesis

On July 3, 2025, Tomás Estrôncio, from the SPAC group, successfully defended his thesis “Identifying Inequalities in Information Diffusion on Social Media: A Study of Twitter Cascades Across User, Content, and Contextual Groups”, as part of the Master’s program in Physical and Technological Engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon.

Tiago Miranda, from SPAC, successfully defended his master thesis today!

He presented his work entitled "Using embeddings to infer diagnostics from medical prescriptions?", and concluded his MSc in Engineering Physics at IST.

SPAC will participate in the 2024 European Researchers’ Night!

This year, the event will take place in Oeiras on September 27, from 4:00 PM to 10:00 PM.

Our work on Overconfidence receives international attention

Our work on overconfidence, published in Nature Human Behaviour (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01677-8 ), is attracting significant attention.

SFI Complex Systems Summer School (CSSS) in New Mexico, USA

From June 9th to July 5th, 2024, Sara Mesquita attended the SFI Complex Systems Summer School (CSSS) in New Mexico, USA.

Iberifier (Iberian Digital Media Observatory) Kick-off

SPAC is one of the members of the second phase of the Iberian Digital Media Observatory, Iberifier (www.iberifier.eu), launched by the European Commission and coordinated by the University of Navarra.

SPAC Lab Retreat workshop in Viena

The SPAC Lab team traveled to Vienna for a lab retreat from April 9th to 12th. This retreat was part of a workshop co-organized between SPAC and the NetIn group, led by Fariba Karimi, at the Complexity Science Hub (CSH) and at the University of Graz.

Joana Gonçalves de Sá joins CSH Visitor Program in Vienna

Joana will be spending a short sabbatical (4 months) at the Complexity Science Hub, in Vienna, as part of her ongoing ERC-FARE grant. Hosted by Fariba Karimi (Network Inequality group) and Stefan Turner, she will join the CSH Visitor Program, from February to June 2024.

Ana Vranić joined the SPAC lab team

SPAC is very happy to welcome Ana Vranić, as a postdoctoral fellow, who will join the ERC-FARE project and study how (dis) information spreads on social networks.

SPAC at the 2023 European Researchers' Night

SPAC was present at the European Researchers' Night for the first time, with an exhibition at the Champalimaud Foundation.

SPAC member Pedro Duarte defends MSc thesis

Pedro Duarte successfully defended his master thesis today! He presented his work entitled "The diffusion of information in social media - How much complexity do we need?...

Women in Network Science Collabathon 2023

Íris Damião was one of 22 students worldwide selected to participate in the WINS Collabathon, which took place in early May 2023 (1st to 5th) at Northeastern University, Boston.

With little knowledge comes great confidence: New Study Reveals Relationship between Knowledge, Confidence, and Attitudes Towards Science

Press Release: A new study, just published in Nature Human Behaviour, sheds light on the intricate interplay between knowledge, confidence, and attitudes towards science. The study, conducted by a strongly multidisciplinary team of scientists, led by LIP’s researcher Joana Gonçalves-Sá, presents compelling evidence that both overconfidence and negative attitudes towards science peak at intermediate knowledge levels.

SPAC is looking for a research administrative intern

We are hiring an intern to support administrative duties related to research management. More info here. Feel free to contact us for any additional information at spac @ lip.pt.

SPAC is hiring a Postdoctoral Researcher

We are looking for a Postdoctoral Researcher to join our team. More info here. Feel free to contact us at spac @ lip.pt for any additional queries.

David Almeida successfully defends his MSc thesis

Our student David Almeida defended his master thesis entitled PandeMedia: an annotated corpus of digital media for issue salience...

Public Presentation – A monitoring system for transmissible respiratory diseases

Information available only in Portuguese.

FCT awards PhD Fellowship to Íris Damião

More good news for SPAC! Íris Damião received a Research Scholarship for PhD from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT)...

SPAC wins ERC social impact grant to develop tool on online privacy and disinformation

Lisbon, 6th of September, the European Research Council (ERC) has awarded a Proof of Concept (PoC) grant to Joana Gonçalves de Sá to conduct the project Fake News Recommendations – an Auditing System of Differential Tracking and Search Engine Results (FARE_AUDIT). Joana Gonçalves de Sá is a researcher at LIP – Laboratory for Instrumentation and Experimental Particle Physics, and the coordinator of the Social Physics and Complexity Lab – SPAC, that uses experimental and computational techniques to study behavior.

Spac in the Computational Summer School on Modeling Social and Collective Behavior (COSMOS) 2022

On July 2022 (4th to 7th), Sara Mesquita and Cristina Mendonça attended the 2022 Computational Summer school on Modeling Social and collective behavior (COSMOS) and participated in tutorials on varied topics, such as modelling social and individual learning, model comparison and robustness, and the cognitive mechanism underlying information cascades. You can find more details here: http://cosmos-konstanz.github.io/

SPAC takes part in NetSciX 2022

Last week, we attended the International School and Conference on Networks Science 2022 in Porto, our first in-person conference since the beginning of the pandemic. Lília Perfeito (PostDoc at SPAC) gave a talk on the dynamics of information spread on Twitter, and Sara Mesquita (PhD student) presented her poster about the changes in online behaviour during COVID-19. More details on the presentations available here.

Our work presented at CCS 2021

On October 26th, we presented two of our projects at the Conference on Complex Systems 2021. One described a model of information spread that does not rely on information on the the underlying network and shows how Tweets can be a good quantitative model for studying cultural evolution. The other was on how excess confidence can explain negative attitudes towards science, including a new metric to gauging confidence. You can find more details about the presentations here.

João Loureiro and Pedro Duarte join SPAC

João Loureiro and Pedro Duarte, two Physical Engineering students at IST, will join SPAC for their MSc thesis. João will be working on forecasting and now-casting emergency unit admissions, while Pedro will be focusing on social network modelling.

SPAC is hiring 2 Junior Developers

We are looking for Junior Programmers who would like to join our team. More info here.

We presented our latest research on spreading of respiratory viruses at IC2S2

Last July, we joined the 7th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2) and talked about our work on non-flu respiratory viruses. We discussed a computational approach which uses epidemiological data, weather data, and Google search trends, to gain insights into the impact of climate in nowcasting models for non-influenza respiratory viruses. You can find more details here.

Our research on information spread on twitter at Networks 2021

On July 8th, we attended Networks 2021 to present our most recent model of information spread on twitter and discuss how Twitter can be a good quantitative model to study cultural evolution. More details here.

Joana Gonçalves de Sá wins Inspiring Women Award

SPAC group leader Joana Gonçalves de Sá received the Activa Inspiring Women 2020 Award, in the Science category. You can read more about Joana’s speech, focusing on diversity in Science, here (Portuguese only).

ECIR 2020 Keynote – Joana Gonçalves de Sá

On April 14th, Joana Sá gave a keynote presentation at ECIR 2020 (42nd European Conference on Information Retrieval), titled “Focusing the macroscope: how we can use data to understand behavior”.

Watch the talk on YouTube.

Our work was accepted for presentation at the CSS_2019

Lília presenting our work at the CSS_2019 in Zurich. Paulo, Lília and Manuel Pita have been analysing the past 40 years of Portuguese democracy and uncovered some interesting differences in voting and discourse.

Fake News Investigation receives Grant of €1.5 million

Lisbon, 3rd of September, the European Research Council has awarded a 1.5 million euros Starting Grant to Joana Gonçalves de Sá to conduct the research project – Fake News and Real People – Using Big Data to Understand Human Behaviour (FARE). Joana Gonçalves de Sá is an Associate Professor and coordinator of the research group on “Data Science and Policy” at NOVA School of Business and Economics (Nova SBE), and uses experimental and computational techniques (“big data” and complex systems) to study the decision-making process.

Three of our projects were accepted for presentation at the IC2S2_2019

Joana presented three of our ongoing projects at the IC2S2 in Amsterdam (July 2019). This is the main conference in computational social sciences, where both social and computational scientists get to interact and learn about each other’s methods.

Philip Ball on our work

Our work on the gap between confidence and knowledge was just discussed by Philip Ball: “Francisco and Gonçalves-Sá’s interesting results feel like a slice through a higher-dimensional space”.

It is really nice to see this discussion getting started. Because a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Philip makes some excellent comments! Many thanks!

Joana Gonçalves-Sá received the “Excellence in Teaching Award”

Joana, the PI of the Data Science and Policy Lab and currently a professor at Nova SBE, received an “Excellence in Teaching Award” today, at Instituto Superior Técnico. Improving teaching and education have been major goals of Joana’s work and this award makes us very proud.

Nova SBE, IGC and ISI Foundation co-organized an event on Artificial Intelligence

On the 7th of March 2019, Nova SBE’s Executive Education, Instituto Gulbenkian da Ciência and ISI Foundation co-organized an event on AI, society and organisations: experiences from applied projects in governments, companies and NGO’s. Our PI, Joana Gonçalves de Sá, was one of the speakers, together with Rayid Ghani, director of the Center for Data Science and Public Policy in the University of Chicago and Chief Scientist at the Obama for America 2012, Leid Zejnilovic, a fellow SBE Professor, Daniela Paolotti and Ciro Cattuto, From the ISI Foundation and Luís Rocha, from Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência and Indiana University. Together, they discussed the role of data science in today’s world and the enormous ethical challenges that we face.