Yitong, Karen and Céline presented the collective work of our SAMBAL team during the MONA Project Webinar on Sustainable Mobility Planning for Tourism Destination. They discussed the potential of using big data in tourism research and showcased findings from our empirical study using geotagged tweets to monitor tourism flows in Belgium. Special thanks to Bart Neuts and Jan van den Borg for the invitation and to all participants for the interesting discussion.

ODISSEI, the Dutch research infrastructure for the social sciences, organized a conference on 10 December 2024 in Utrecht, the Netherlands. A number of computational social scientists - including Anirudh and Yitong - took part in a day of sessions on new datasets, approaches, and theories, research ethics, and policy impacts. Anirudh also presented a poster on his recent work with Ate Poorthuis and Ben Derudder on cocooning, a form of activity space segregation. Many of the slides and posters are available on ODISSEI’s Zenodo community.

During our recent team-building trip, we enjoyed the Ardennes landscape while participating in group activities: we set some team goals for the upcoming academic year and we took part in a storytelling workshop. We also competed at minigolf and played boardgames, we shared delicious meals and warmly welcomed Benoit, the newest member of our group!