Esteban Moro - Collaborating with the Competition Artwork

Too Lazy to Read the Paper

In this podcast the author explains a paper to me, your host, Professor Sune Lehmann (https://sunelehmann.com). The participants are authors of a paper in network science or data science. Sometimes I feature a group of co-authors! The intended audience is PhD students, PostDocs and other scientists. The idea is to start with a bit about the paper's author, the idea for the paper. Then talk about the research itself. And we’ll end by gossiping about the reviewing process, etc. The whole thing is based on the idea that papers are so formal. And that when two people talk to each other informally, it’s often more fun – and tends to get ideas across more effectively.

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Too Lazy to Read the Paper

Esteban Moro - Collaborating with the Competition

August 20, 2022 • Season 2 • Episode 6

Hey Everyone,

Today, we have another amazing guest. It’s Esteban Moro (1)!

Esteban is a researcher, data scientist and professor at Universidad Carlos III (UC3M) in Spain and Visiting Professor at MIT Media Lab and MIT Connection Science at IDSS. Previously, I was researcher at University of Oxford.

He is a native of Salamanca (Spain) … we talk about that … and hold a PhD in Physics.

Esteban’s work lies in the intersection of big data and computational social science, with special attention to human dynamics, collective intelligence, social networks and urban mobility in problems like viral marketing, natural disaster management, or economical segregation in cities.

Esteban is creative and exploring in his work, and has made important contributions in a number of topics, especially recently using massive datasets to understand problems like how humans communicate, how to political opinion spreads in social networks or building alternative wellbeing indexes.

His work has appeared in major journals including PNAS or Science Advances and is regularly covered by media outlets The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, El País (Spain).

In our conversation, we talk about his career, his science, and go deep with his 2011 paper “Dynamical strength of social ties in information spreading” (2), which is not only an interesting paper … but also comes with a very nice story of how we can build communities in science by collaborating even between competing groups.

References
(1) http://estebanmoro.org
(2) https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.83.045102

Credits
The podcast has theme music by Waylon Thornton (and a little bit by me as well). WT's songs are "American Heart" and "Seven". Via freemusicarchive.org and licenced under CC BY-NC-SA. The podcast was funded in part by the Villum Foundation.