Dr Andrea Giovannetti joined the VRC in mid March 2022 but has been collaborating remotely since 2020. He is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow and works with Dr Paolo Campana on the project “Modelling the dynamics of Violent Gang-Crime: a Network approach”, financed by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for Research and Innovation of the EU Commission.
Which are the three questions that drive your work?
- How does the interaction between incentive-driven and spatially-contextualized offenders determine group-level activities, in particular, contagious phenomena such as burst of violent behaviour (e.g., knife epidemics)?
- How can individual-level activities escalate to systemically relevant phenomena that unfold through relational networks?
- Can we develop network-based local targeting policies to de-escalate phenomena of systemic violence?
Which three keywords summarise your research?
- Co-offending networks
- Computational methods, statistical and agent-based techniques
- Dynamical analysis of networks
What is the current focus of your studies?
My research is about the propagation of criminal behaviours along groups of co-offenders. Even in absence of centralized organization, criminal behaviours can systemically synchronize and lead to the emergence of critical and very elusive systemic phenomena, such as the contemporary knife epidemics plaguing the streets of UK. I look at the latent nexus between the geometrical and statistical properties of large human networks and the dynamics of deviant behaviour. I do so by making extensive use of computation network theory and statistical analysis.