Shayan Alipour avatar

Shayan Alipour

Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science
Sapienza University of Rome

About Me

I'm a final-year PhD candidate in Computer Science at Sapienza University of Rome, where I'm advised by Prof. Walter Quattrociocchi. My research interests lie at the intersection of Machine Learning, Network Science, and Computational Social Science, with a particular focus on understanding the dynamics of user interactions on social media, trying to find out if there's more to social media than just cat videos and memes!


My work has been published in high-impact journals such as Nature and has been recognized by both peers and media. A key component of my research involves conducting robust computational analyses on large-scale datasets and recognizing that online platforms serve as both mirrors and shapers of human behavior.


I'm a recipient of the Sapienza's CS "Departmental Excellence" Scholarship and have been fortunate to receive several grants for my research. I hold MSc and BSc degrees in Computer Science from Sapienza University of Rome and the K. N. Toosi University of Technology. Alongside my studies, I interned at small companies to build automation tools for resume processing and web scraping.


I'm always excited to collaborate with fellow researchers. Over the years, I've had the pleasure of collaborating with amazing people from institutions such as the University of Washington, Stanford, the Complexity Science Hub, and many others. As a true believer in the network effect, I love connecting with others. Feel free to reach out, I'd be more than happy to have a quick chat!

News

December 2024: Presented my poster at NeurIPS AFME workshop
November 2024: New preprint on LLM alignment (paper)
September 2024: CDCS's second annual open day (link)
August 2024: Talks at ICML were great, the sandwiches not so much (image)
July 2024: Summer internship at Complexity Science Hub in Vienna (image)
May 2024: Physcial copy of our Nature paper arrived (link)
April 2024: New preprint on evaluation of visual language models for medicine (link)
April 2024: IEEE paper out about user volatility (link)
April 2024: Nature paper out on Toxicity (link)
February 2024: Paper out, see how ppl are talking about AI on social media (link)
February 2024: AAAI photographer caught us in action (image)
January 2024: My first paper is out! (link)
September 2023: Presenting at CDCS lab's open day (image)
August 2023: Attended Social Science Methods summer school at Universita' della Svizzera italiana
June 2023: Got a grant to attend Social ComQuant summer school in Turin (link)
November 2022: Awarded Sapienza's CS ”Departmental Excellence” Scholarship & started my PhD
September 2022: Worked with RaiNews on how social media shaped the 2022 Italian election. (link)
October 2022: Defended my Master's thesis, Hooray!

Publications

Persistent interaction patterns across social media platforms and over time
Michele Avalle, Niccolò Di Marco, Gabriele Etta, Emanuele Sangiorgio, Shayan Alipour, Anita Bonetti, Lorenzo Alvisi, Antonio Scala, Andrea Baronchelli, Matteo Cinelli, Walter Quattrociocchi
Nature 2024
Cross-platform social dynamics: an analysis of ChatGPT and COVID-19 vaccine conversations
Shayan Alipour, Alessandro Galeazzi, Emanuele Sangiorgio, Michele Avalle, Ljubisa Bojic, Matteo Cinelli, Walter Quattrociocchi
Scientific Reports 2024
Users volatility on Reddit and Voat
Niccolò Di Marco, Matteo Cinelli, Shayan Alipour, Walter Quattrociocchi
IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems 2024
The drivers of global news spreading patterns
Shayan Alipour, Niccolò Di Marco, Michele Avalle, Gabriele Etta, Matteo Cinelli, Walter Quattrociocchi
Scientific Reports 2024
Evaluating General Vision-Language Models for Clinical Medicine
Yixing Jiang, Jesutofunmi A Omiye, Cyril Zakka, Michael Moor, Haiwen Gui, Shayan Alipour, Seyed Shahabeddin Mousavi, Jonathan H Chen, Pranav Rajpurkar, Roxana Daneshjou
medRxiv 2024
Robustness and Confounders in the Demographic Alignment of LLMs with Human Perceptions of Offensiveness
Shayan Alipour, Indria Sen, Mattia Samory, Tanushree Mitra
arXiv 2024