Lisette Espín-Noboa

I am a computer scientist working in computational social science. My research lies at the intersection of network science, social science, and artificial intelligence, with the goal of developing methods that contribute to progress on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Currently, I'm a senior postdoc at the Algorithmic Fairness and Network Inequality group at the Complexity Science Hub (CSH) in Vienna. I'm working with Fariba Karimi on redefining fairness by considering social networks and social capital. Our aim is to understand under which conditions network biases or inequalities are acceptable or deemed unfair in network-based decision-making processes  (SDGs: 5, 10, 16).

Last year, I was a Visiting Professor at the Institute of Human-Centred Computing at the Graz University of Technology (TU Graz) where I taught computational scientific programming and methods to measure inequality and fairness in social networks. From 2021 to 2025, I was a postdoc at the Department of Network and Data Science at Central European University (CEU), I worked with Márton Karsai and János Kertész on producing high-resolution poverty maps by inferring the distribution of wealth across sub-populations (rural/urban and rich/poor) using multi-modal data (e.g., satellite images and mobility networks) and transferable models. (SDGs: 1, 3, 11). 

During my PhD, I was a research assistant at the Computational Social Science department at GESIS. During this time, I investigated the effects of network structure on ranking, network inference, and human navigation. I worked with my supervisors Claudia Wagner and Markus Strohmaier, and colleagues Fariba Karimi, Florian Lemmerich and Philipp Singer.