In my research, I study drivers of success in sports and science. In particular, my work on success in ERC funding in EU was published in Nature. Scholar page-here. I seek platforms where data-driven research can incorporate insights from a networks perspective and inform policy decisions and drive systems towards prosocial behavior.

Select Works

Dependency of ERC funded research on US collaborations

S Chowdhary, N Defenu, F Musciotto, F Battiston; Nature Physics, 1-4 (2023)

Funding Bias: nurture European researchers’ independence

S Chowdhary, N Defenu, F Musciotto, F Battiston; Nature 616 (7955), 33 (2023)

Annually, the European Research Council (ERC) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) allocate resources to promote research excellence in Europe and the USA. We observe that European Union (EU)-based researchers rely strongly on United States (US) collaborations to secure top EU funding, while the reverse is much less common.

Quantifying human performance in chess

S Chowdhary, I Iacopini, F Battiston; Scientific Reports 13 (1), 2113 (2023)

Leveraging over 120 million games between almost 1 million players, we find that individuals encounter hot streaks of repeated success, longer for beginners than for expert players, and even longer cold streaks of unsatisfying performance.

Skilled players can be distinguished from the others based on their style. Differences appear from the very first moves of the game, with experts tending to specialize and repeat the same openings while beginners explore and diversify more.

Over time, the opening diversity of a player tends to decrease, hinting at the development of individual playing styles. Nevertheless, we find that players are often not able to recognize their most successful openings.

Here we introduce escape rooms as social laboratory, which allows us to capture at a high resolution real-time communications in small project teams. Our analysis portrays a nuanced picture of different dimensions of social dynamics. We reveal how socio-demographic characteristics impact problem solving and the importance of prior relationships for enhanced interactions. We extract key conversation rules from motif analysis and discuss turn-usurping gendered behavior, a phenomenon particularly strong in male-dominated teams. We investigate the temporal evolution of signed and group interactions, finding that a minimum level of tense communication might be beneficial for collective problem solving, and revealing differences in the behavior of successful and failed teams. Our work unveils the innovative potential of escape rooms to study teams in their complexity, contributing to a deeper understanding of the micro-dynamics of collaborative team processes.

The anatomy of social dynamics in escape rooms

R O. Szabo, S Chowdhary, D Deritei, F Battiston; Scientific Reports 12 (1), 10498 (2022)

Formation, Life and Death of Scientific Teams

Teams are dynamical entities, made of core members who consistently work together, surrounded by transient members who sporadically participate.

I have researched through a dataset of over 248 million scientific papers published since 1900, we extract 511,550 persistent teams of scientists. I look into `team careers' investigating their trajectories in time, characterizing their formation, productivity and eventual death.

Classifying team based on age composition, geography and scientific disciplines, I investigate the academic impact of persistent collaborations, hallmarking the key compositional features underlying their success.

This work will shed light on the nature of persistent teams and on their scientific impact, informing researchers, institutions and funding agencies about which collaborations are worth promoting.

Examining Teams Critically

Teams are the fundamental units propelling innovation and advancing modern science, technology and industry.

Shape of a team: tracking team history via networks

Should Game development industry use "Science of teams" to organize themselves? I think a deeper bridge needs building...

Inspired by Game Developers Conference talks on how Science can help #gamedevs teams (https://lnkd.in/eiepGDch),
I did some analysis of the team behind the acclaimed game 'Disco Elysium' by ZA/UM, it reveals interesting interplay of expertise, past shared collaborations and freshness. How aligned is it with 'Science of Teams' though?

I want to develop a science for how game dev teams should look like from a networks perpective!