The time has finally come! The NetSci conference—the place to be if you are interested in complex networks—is happening next week, from June 1st to June 5th. The venue is in Zaragoza, Spain. You can get all the information you need about the event from the official website. For the third year, I am co-organizing one of its satellite events: the Multiple Network Modeling, Analysis and Mining symposium, this year held jointly with Networks of Networks. The satellite will take place on June 2nd. As I previously said, unfortunately I am not going to be physically present in Span, and that makes me sad, because we have a phenomenal program this year.

We have four great invited speakers: Giovanni Sansavini, Rui Carvalho, Arunabha Sen and Katharina Zweig. It is a perfect mix between the infrastructure focus of the networks of networks crowd and the multidisciplinary approach of multiple networks. Sansavini works on reliability and risk engineering, while Carvalho focuses on characterizing and modeling networks in energy. Sen and Zweig provide their outstanding experience in the fields of computer networks and graph theory.

Among the contributed talks I am delighted to see that many interesting names from the network analysis crowd decided to send their work to be presented in our event. Among the highlights we have a contribution from the group of Mason Porter, who won last year’s Erdos Prize as one of the most outstanding young network scientists. I am also happy to see contributions from the group of Cellai and Gleeson, with whom I share not only an interest on multiplex networks, but also on internet memes. Contributions from groups lead by heavyweights like Schweitzer and Havlin are another sign of the attention that this event has captured.

I hope many of you will attend this seminar. You’ll be in good hands: Gregorio D’Agostino, Przemyslaw Kazienko and Antonio Scala will be much better hosts than I can ever be. I am copying here the full program of the event. Enjoy Spain!

NoN’15 Program

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My personal quest as ambassador of multiple networks at NetSci (previous episodes here and here) is continuing also this year. And, as every year, there are new exciting things coming along. This year, the usual satellite I organize is marrying another satellite. We are in fact merging our multiple networks with the Networks of Networks crowd. Networks of Networks is a society holding its own satellite at NetSci since quite a while. They are also interested in networks with multiple node and edge types, with more attention to infrastructure-flavored networks: computer networks, power grids, water infrastructure and so on. We are very excited to see what the impact between multiple networks and networks of networks, directed in particular by Antonio Scala and Gregorio D’Agostino, will generate.

The marriage is a promising one because, when talking about multiple networks and infrastructure, technical knowledge is dispersed among experts of different sectors – system operators from different industries (electric, gas, telecommunication, food chain, water supply, etc) – while researchers from different fields developed a number of different strategies to deal with these complex objects – from computer science to physics, from economics to humanities. To be exposed to these approaches and to confront one’s understanding of the potentialities of the analysis of multiple interdependent networks is key for the development of a common language to integrate the knowledge from all sectors. Complex Networks can be a common language for the needed federated approaches at both microscopic and macroscopic level. This satellite is here exactly to foster the development of such common language.

The usual practical information you might find useful:

• The satellite will take place on June 2nd, 2015. It will be held, as usual, jointly with the other NetSci satellites. The location will be Zaragoza, Spain. The information about how to get there is included in the NetSci website.
• The official website of the satellite is hosted by the Net-o-Nets parent website. The official page is this one. Information about the satellite is pretty bare-bones at the moment, but we’ll flesh it out in the following weeks.
• We are open to submissions! You can send in your abstract and we’ll consider you for a contributed talk. The submission system goes through EasyChair, and this is the official link. The deadline for submission is April 19th, 2015 and we will notify you on April 29th.

Sadly, I will not be present in person to the event due to conflicting schedules. So I will not be able to write the usual report. I’ll leave you in the best hands possible. Submit something, and stop by in Zaragoza: you’ll find an exciting and stimulating crowd!

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NetSci, the top global conference about network science, never fails to be a tornado of ideas. Now that the dust has settled, I feel a bit easier to put this year’s thoughts on this post. Yes, this is yet another conference report by yours truly.

Let’s first get over the mandatory part of the report: an evaluation of the awesomeness of the Multiple Networks satellite I co-organized with my friends scattered around Europe. As said, this year’s edition was open to submissions and we received 17 of them. I think that, as a start, that is a good figure. Also, the attendance was more than satisfactory, and it appears scattered only because we got the largest room of the conference! Here’s proof!

The overall event was a great success. The talks were very interesting and we had a great unexpected bonus point. One of our keynotes, as you might remember, was Mason Porter. Well, the guy actually got the Erdos-Renyi prize this year! The Erdos-Renyi prize has been established in 2012 and it goes to outstanding young researchers in network science. Well, make a note of this: speaking at the Multiple Networks satellite will eventually get you some important awards. After all, everybody knows that correlation = causation.

My favorite satellite (besides the one I organized, obviously) continues to be the Arts, Humanities and Complex Networks symposium. This year it was a little bit tougher than usual, with a lot of qualitative stuff that not everybody can appreciate. However, their keynote by Lada Adamic was nothing short of outstanding. She is currently working at Facebook, a position that gives her a privileged vantage point over memes and viral events. You know that those things tickle my curiosity very strongly, and Lada’s work is really great. She presented her work, where she proves that meme evolution and mutation on Facebook follows very closely the same mechanics of evolution and mutation we find in the biological world. Good news for my old paper, which was heading in the same direction!

Which brings me to the main conference, because one of the best talks I attended was from Jon Kleinberg, who collaborated with Lada on another memes-meet-Facebook work. In that case, there is less good news for me. My research plan is to use meme content to predict virality. However, the Kleinberg-Adamic dream team showed that content is actually a very weak factor! (Here’s a blog post about it).

There is still hope, though. My way to deal with content is fundamentally different than theirs. Plus the problem they are studying is slightly different from mine: they are analyzing memes that are already going viral and they want to know how popular they will get. I’m more focused on knowing if the meme is going to be popular at all, and I’m not that concerned about whether everybody will know it or only a niche group.

Virality of content was a very hot topic this year, because there were two other fantastic talks about it. One was by Sinan Aral, and he talked about how much we are influenced by a post’s popularity when we read it. Controlling for content (and believe me when I say that Sinan is one of the best experiment designers out there), if we know that a post is popular we are more likely to upvote it. This is so true that Reddit itself decided, for some subreddits, to hide the post score for the first few hours, so that real good content will eventually flow to the top once the discussion is settled.

On top of that, also James Gleeson talked about a theoretical model that can account for the popularity distribution of memes. The model sounds simple. You just assume that a person has a box containing all the memes they saw in the past. With some probability, the person will either come up with something new or reshare a meme from their box. When resharing from the box, there is a memory effect for which more recent memes are more likely to be reshared. Whenever you share something, regardless if it is new or not, it ends up in your friend’s boxes. Even if it looks so simple, the actual solution of the model isn’t it at all and James is so good he defies belief. And, at the end of the day, everything works like a charm. Again, this does not bother me too much, because it only predicts the distribution of popularity, not which memes are going to be popular, a different problem.

Besides all this work meme popularity, there were other very interesting talks. I mention:

• The very elegant talk by Chris Moore on community discovery, which also has the by-product of providing witty one liners for many occasions (for example “Physicists like to minimize functions because, you know, rocks fall”);
• The nice talk by Frank Schweitzer on the role of active individuals in collaboration networks, who have the side effect of making the networks more unstable and prone to breaking apart (damn you, hyper-active people!);
• The usual fun of the lighting talks (they could not call them ignite talks because of copyright issues). My favorite for this year was from Max Schich, with a really great panorama of the art market in London, Paris and Amsterdam from the Getty dataset. Aaron Clauset and Roberta Sinatra deserve to be mentioned too, with two great talks about climbing the greasy pole in academia (is it really worth it to shoot for big name universities? Short answer: no).

That’s it! You can see that also this year there was a lot to see and to think about. I am already looking forward for next year!

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Friends, scientists, network fanatics, lend me your eyes: I come to announce the program of the Multiple Network Modeling, Analysis and Mining symposium, introduced some months ago on these pages. To give you a quick recap: this is a satellite event which will happen at the 2014 edition of NetSci, a major network science event of the year. The symposium will take place on Monday June 2nd, while the conference itself will start on June 4th and it will last until the end of the week. Differently from last year, we now have space for contributed talks and I like the program we were able to set up. So, I’ll boast about it here.

You can find the overview of the entire event on the official website, but let me give you the highlights.

We have four invited speakers: Frank Schweitzer, Renaud Lambiotte, Nitesh Chawla and Mason Porter. They come from different backgrounds (System Design, Mathematics and Computer Science) which is a great plus for the event. They are going to:

• Tackle the mathematical foundations of multiple networks;
• Describe models for multiple networks;
• Analyse them, both in the flavour of bipartite temporal social networks and in the extension of the classic link prediction problem. Usually in link prediction we are interested in evaluating the likelihood of seeing “a” connection between two nodes. Since in multiple networks there are different types of connections, we are also interested in predicting “which” connection we will observe.

As for the contributed talks, we have a pretty good team, including (but not limited to) works signed by David Lazer from Northeastern University, Juyong Park from KAIST, Eugene Stanley from Boston University and many more. We had such a positive reaction to our call for papers, that we had to increase the slots for contributed talks from 5 to 7 and still reject presentations that we really wanted to see. Among my favourites works there are:

• Multiple network applications to study the productivity of countries and predicting their growth;
• The study of evolution of different relations among almost 2000 students from 14 US universities;
• A network-based approach for ranking the performances of sport teams;
• Novel way to classify nodes in complex networks where multiple different relations are present;
• … and more!

For completeness, here’s the detailed schedule, I hope to see many of you there!

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You know that I am a guy deeply involved in multiple networks, networks containing different types of relations. You probably also remember that last year I organized, with Matteo Magnani, Luca Rossi, Dino Pedreschi, Guido Caldarelli and Przemyslaw Kazienko, a symposium on such a fascinating mathematical model and its applications (my report on it). Well: it is going to happen again at the 2014 edition of NetSci.

Some things changed since last year. Let me start from the most important. This year we are open to contributed talks! Last year the speakers where invitation-only: we were just starting and we wanted to understand what kind of crowd we had. The response was positive for the event and negative for the poor guy (me) who had to find extra chairs to accommodate the larger-than-expected bunch of people who showed up. So, choose your best work on multiple (multiplex, multidimensional, multilayer, multirelational… whatever!) networks and send a 300-word abstract and a figure here: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=mnam2014. You have time until April 14th, and you will receive notification of acceptance in two weeks, April 28th.

We are still going to have exciting keynotes, of course. So far, the first confirmed speaker is Renaud Lambiotte. If you read this blog, chances are that you are already familiar with the outstanding work he is doing in network science.

The date of the event didn’t change, it is still the first week of June (UPDATE: the exact day the satellite will take place is June 2nd, for the entire day). The location, of course, did: it is going to happen in Berkeley California, at the Claremont Hotel and the Clark Kerr Campus of the University of California. We go where NetSci goes, and with a reason: NetSci is the premier venue if you are interested in network science. And we want to play with the coolest kids, don’t we?

Two other things did not change and are worth remembering. First, participation is free of charge. We are interested in your brains, not your wallets. (UPDATE: Apparently, even if you are just attending this satellite, NetSci’s organizers require you to register anyway. Rates and information are here. Early registration is April 4th. Here, we are still interested just in your brains, though 🙂 ). Second, we are still asking you to tell us if you are planning to come to the event. It is mostly a selfish maneuver: I want to limit my quests in finding extra chairs to the minimum. For this reason, we set up this handy and quick Google form for you.

So, don’t forget to send us an abstract. And see you in just a couple of months in Berkeley!

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As I mentioned a couple of months ago, during the first week of June the NetSci conference took place. NetSci is the main venue that brings together all researchers interested and involved in network science. It has always been a gigantic opportunity to put you in contact with the big shots in network analysis and an excellent playground for very interesting discussions. This year was no different.

Of course, for me the most important part of it was the very first day, when the satellite on multiple networks (organized by myself together with Matteo Magnani, Dino Pedreschi, Luca Rossi, Guido Caldarelli and Przemyslaw Kazienko) happened. As I wrote more than once in the past, multiple networks are networks in which the nodes may be connected with different kinds of interactions (friendship, collaboration, and so on).

It was an extremely interesting event; a first step to bring together many researchers working on the topic of multiple networks, most of whom hadn’t spoken to each other up until then. And when I say it was a smooth and successful operation, you don’t have to take my word for it. We have proof of a room full of brilliant minds taking up all the available spots… and beyond:

The talks were very impressive:

• We learnt how to measure eigenvector centrality on multiple networks (and you can too);
• We learnt how to extend basic measures from regular complex networks to multiple networks (and you can too);
• We learnt how to mine network with heterogeneous information on nodes and edges (and you can too);
• We learnt how to detect communities on multiple networks (and you can too);
• We learnt how to infer the latent structure of inter-related networks (and you can too);
• We learnt how a random walker behaves on dynamic networks (and you can too);
• We learnt about the structure and dynamics of multiple networks (and you can too);
• And we learnt how the properties of multiple networks arise when adding one network at a time (and you can too).

But NetSci, of course, was much more than just this satellite. Another event you absolutely didn’t want to miss there was the Arts, Humanities and Complex Networks Symposium, organized by Max Schich and Isabel Meirelles.

They are both great guys, with a gigantic knowledge about art and design. For example, they picked up a great reference for the logo of their symposium, namely one of the most known infographics made about visual arts, by Alfred Barr:

And besides the usual great lineup of talks (from the Wikidata project to a very cool movie ranking multiple network algorithm) you can learn surprising stuff about basically everything. My favorite: the observation of one of the speakers about the above visualization itself. Apparently, he was the first to realize that there is a bull up there (hint: Cubism lays in between the bull’s horns). As Max then puts it:

Then… the rest of the conference. It is impossible to even give a close idea of the overload of ideas and flashes of genius that populated the venue for those three days. I’ll work around the problem and cheat by giving you a laundry list of (a very tight subset of) the things that most impressed me during the conference:

• The excellent invited talk by Shlomo Havlin about interdependent networks (networks which depend on each other to function, much like a computer network controlling the electric grid). This interests me because he claims that interdependent networks are a more general case of multiple networks (although I personally have an inkling that perhaps they can be reduced to the same model);
• The usual spectacular presentation style of my friend Cesàr Hidalgo, who this time talked about a complex system showing a nested structure: namely, the cultural exports of different countries;
• A really great contributed talk by Esteban Moro, which in my opinion could have been a keynote speech as well. Dr. Moro highlighted how people have a trade-off between social capacity (how many relationships we can keep alive) and social activity (how many new people we can meet). As a consequence, different social strategies arise;
• A brilliant mathematical formulation of a network problem by Jure Leskovec, that, in my opinion, could be the final word about the problem itself. And it resembles the formal mathematical formulation of the same algorithmic idea behind my DEMON;
• And the hilarious ignite talks, 5 minutes and 20 slides for each speaker. There was no possibility of interacting, with the presentation automatically jumping to the next slide every 15 seconds. Next year I definitely want to try to do one too.

And, of course, many other things. But you get the idea: blog posts about it are boring, you really have to experience it yourself.

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This month, I am interrupting the sequence of posts discussing my papers for a shameless self-promotion – after all, this entire website is shameless self-promotion, so I don’t see a problem in what I’m doing. Some months ago, I discussed my work on multidimensional networks, networks that include different kinds of relations at the same time. The whole point of the post was that these are different animals than traditional complex networks, and thus they require new tools and a new mindset.

So I asked myself: “What is the best way to create this new sensibility in the network community?”. I also asked a bunch of other great people, in no particular order: Matteo Magnani, Luca Rossi, Dino Pedreschi, Guido Caldarelli and Przemyslaw Kazienko. The result was the topic of today’s post: a symposium in the 2013 edition of the NetSci conference!

NetSci is a great venue for network people. From their website:

“The conference focuses on interdisciplinary research on networks from various disciplines such as economy, biology, medicine, or sociology, and aims to bring new network analytic methods from physics, computer science, math, or statistics to the attention of a large and diverse audience.”

This year, NetSci will take place in Copenhagen and you should check out a number of reasons for attending. One of those reasons is our symposium, called “Multiple Network Modeling, Analysis and Mining“. You can check important information about attending the symposium in the official event webpage: http://multiplenetworks.netsci2013.net/. Here are the three main highlights:

• It is an excellent occasion to learn more about multidimensional networks, a model that can help understand the complex interplay between the different relationships we establish every day (friendship, collaboration, club membership, …), better than everything else has been done before;
• We still have to finalize our speaker list, but it will be of very high quality and will include Jiawei Han, Lei Tang, Renaud Lambiotte and others;
• Symposium attendance is free! And there will be free food! Woo-hoo! Just sign up in the official Google Doc.

Don’t take my word on the first point and check out the publications we refer to in our webpage. Here, following the above mentioned shameless self-promotion, I’ll list the papers on the subject written by yours truly:

• Berlingerio, M., Coscia, M., Giannotti, F., Monreale, A. and Pedreschi, D., Multidimensional networks: foundations of structural analysis. In World Wide Web Journal, 2012.
• Berlingerio, M., Coscia, M., Giannotti, F., Monreale, A. and Pedreschi, D., The Pursuit of Hubbiness: analysis of hubs in large multidimensional networks. In Journal of Computational Science, 2011.
• Berlingerio, M., Coscia, M., Giannotti, F., Monreale, A. and Pedreschi, D., Foundations of Multidimensional Network Analysis. In ASONAM, 2011.
• Berlingerio, M., Coscia, M., Giannotti, F., Finding and Characterizing Communities in Multidimensional Networks. In ASONAM, 2011.

If you find all of this interesting, I definitely hope to see you in Copenhagen this June!

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