Javier Borge-Holthoefer received a PhD in Computer Science from the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV) in Tarragona (Catalonia, Spain) in 2011. He currently leads the Complex Systems group at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (CoSIN3). His research stems from Interdisciplinary Physics and it deals with complex social systems and urban science. Among other appointments, he has taught at the Department of Computer Science and Mathematics and at the Department of Psychology (both in URV). Before joining the IN3, he was a member of the COSNET Lab and held a position as a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Biocomputation and Physics of Complex Systems (BIFI), University of Zaragoza (2011–2013). He then moved to Qatar to work as a Scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), Hamad bin Khalifa University (2014–2016). With more than 30 peer-reviewed articles, his work has been published (among others) in Science Advances, Social Networks, Scientific Reports, EPJ Data Science, Physical Review E, PLoS One and Europhysics Letters. Dr Borge-Holthoefer has also contributed a book and several chapters around the problem of disease and information spreading on complex networks.

Sandra González-Bailón is an assistant professor at the Annenberg School, University of Pennsylvania, where she leads the DiMeNet research group (Digital Media, Networks, and Political Communication). She received a PhD in Sociology from Oxford University (Nuffield College) and spent five years as a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute. Her research areas include network science, data mining, computational tools, and political communication. She has authored more than thirty journal articles and book chapters, and written op-eds and commentaries for several international outlets on the role that social media plays in collective action and political mobilization. She is the author of the book Decoding the Social World: When Data Science meets Communication (forthcoming with MIT Press) and the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Networked Communication (forthcoming with Oxford University Press, co-edited with Brooke Foucault-Welles).