Northeastern’s Sternberg Family Distinguished University Professor Alessandro Vespignani, director of the Network Science Institute (NetSI) and Laboratory for the Modeling of Biological and Sociotechnical Systems (MOBS Lab), is focused on the study of “techno-social” systems, where infrastructures composed of different technological layers are interoperating within the social component that drives their use and development. In this context we aim at understanding how the very same elements assembled in large number can give rise – according to the various forces and elements at play – to different macroscopic and dynamical behaviors, opening the path to quantitative computational approaches and forecasting power.