Michele Coscia

Cultural analytics means using data analysis techniques to understand culture — now or in the past. The aim is to include as many sources as possible: not just text, but also pictures, music, sculptures, performance arts, and everything that makes a culture. This winter I was fairly involved with the cultural analytics group CUDAN in Tallinn, and I wanted to share my experiences.

CUDAN organized the 2023 Cultural Data Analytics Conference, which took place in December 13th to 16th. The event was a fantastic showcase of the diversity and the thriving community that is doing work in the field. Differently than other posts I made about my conference experiences, you don’t have to take my word for its awesomeness, because all the talks were recorded and are available on YouTube. You can find them at the conference page I linked above.

My highlights of the conference were:

• Alberto Acerbi & Joe Stubbersfield’s telephone game with an LLM. Humans have well-known biases when internalizing stories. In a telephone game, you ask humans to sum up stories, and they will preferably remember some things but not others — for instance, they’re more likely to remember parts of the story that conform to their gender biases. Does ChatGPT do the same? It turns out that it does! (Check out the paper)
• Olena Mykhailenko’s report on evolving values and political orientations of rural Canadians. Besides being an awesome example of how qualitative analysis can and does fit in cultural analytics, it was also an occasion to be exposed to a worldview that is extremely distant from the one most of the people in the audience are used to. It was a universe-expanding experience at multiple levels!
• Vejune Zemaityte et al.’s work on the Soviet newsreel production industry. I hardly need to add anything to that (how cool is it to work on Soviet newsreels? Maybe it’s my cinephile soul speaking), but the data itself is fascinating: extremely rich and spanning practically a century, with discernible eras and temporal patterns.
• Mauro Martino’s AI art exhibit. Mauro is an old friend of mine, and he’s always doing super cool stuff. In this case, he created a movie with Stable Diffusion, recreating the feel of living in Milan without actually using any image from Milan. The movie is being shown in various airports around the world.
• Chico Camargo & Isabel Sebire made a fantastic analysis of narrative tropes analyzing the network of concepts extracted from TV Tropes (warning: don’t click the link if you want to get anything done today).

But my absolute favorite can only be: Corinna Coupette et al.’s “All the world’s a (hyper)graph: A data drama”. The presentation is about a relational database on Shakespeare plays, connecting characters according to their co-appearances. The paper describing the database is… well. It is written in the form of a Shakespearean play, with the authors struggling with the reviewers. This is utterly brilliant, bravo! See it for yourself as I cannot make it justice here.

As for myself, I was presenting a work with Camilla Mazzucato on our network analysis of the Turkish Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük. We’re trying to figure out if the material culture we find in buildings — all the various jewels, tools, and other artifacts — tell us anything about the social and biological relationships between the people who lived in those buildings. We can do that because the people at Çatalhöyük used to bury their dead in the foundations of a new building (humans are weird). You can see the presentation here:

After the conference, I was kindly invited to hold a seminar at CUDAN. This was a much longer dive into the kind of things that interest me. Specifically, I focused on how to use my node attribute analysis techniques (node vector distances, Pearson correlations on networks, and more to come) to serve cultural data analytics. You can see the full two hour discussion here:

And that’s about it! Cultural analytics is fun and I look forward to be even more involved in it!

Continue Reading

For NetSci22, I will join forces once again with the great Morgan Frank to bring you the second edition of the “Complex Networks in Economics and Innovation” satellite (post and official website of the first edition).

Once again, we’re looking for contributed talks, giving you an opportunity to showcase your work. Topics that are more than welcome include:

• Mapping the relationship of complex economic activities at the global, regional, and local level;
• Tracking flows of knowhow in all its forms;
• Creating networks of related tasks and skills to estimate knockoff effects and productivity gains of automation;
• Investigating the dynamics of research and innovation via analysis of patents, inventions, and science;
• Uncovering scaling laws and other growth trends able to describe the systemic increase in complexity of activities due to agglomeration;
• In general, any application of network analysis that can be used to further our understanding of economics.

The submission link is: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=cnei22. The full call text is here. And this is the official website. You should send a one-page one-figure abstract before May 13th, 2022.

We have a fantastic lineup of invited speakers you’ll mingle with:

• Ricardo Hausmann (Harvard University)
• Neave O’Clery (University College London)
• Teresa Farinha (UNU-MERIT)
• Alessandra Urbinati (University of Turin)
• Renaud Lambiotte (University of Oxford)
• Francois Lafond (University of Oxford)

The event will be held online on Zoom. The organization details are still pending confirmation, but we should have secured the date of July 18th, 2022. We should start at 8AM Eastern time (2PM Europe time) and have a 6-hour program. This could still change, so stay tuned for updates!

I hope to see your abstract in my inbox and then you presenting at the satellite!

Continue Reading

This year, I’ll be organizing a satellite event at the Networks21 conference, the major 2021 event bringing together all network scientists — merging the Sunbelt and the NetSci crowds for the first time! The satellite will be about network applications on research about economic development and innovation. The most excellent Morgan Frank and Lingfei Wu are the other engines behind this project. I briefly introduced it in this earlier post.

I’m glad to report that now we have a final roster of participants. We received several abstracts for the contributed talks and we managed to squeeze eight of them in our program. What follows is the current schedule — minor changes might happen due to author constraints and I will try to keep this post up to date. Note that the satellite will happen Wednesday, June 30, 2021, and all times reported are US East coast time.

• 8:30AM Invited I: Lü Linyuan
• 9:10AM Invited II: R. Maria del Rio-Chanona
• 9:50AM Contributed I: Process-driven network analysis of a mobile money system in Asia. Carolina Mattsson and Frank Takes.
• 10:10AM Contributed II: Discovering industries in networks of words. Juan Mateos-Garcia, Bishop Alex and Richardson George.
• 10:30AM Break
• 10:50AM Invited III: Yong-Yeol “YY” Ahn
• 11:30AM Contributed III: From code to market: Network of developers and correlated returns of cryptocurrencies. Lorenzo Lucchini, Laura Maria Alessandretti, Bruno Lepri, Angela Gallo and Andrea Baronchelli.
• 11:50AM Contributed IV: What is a Labor Market? Classifying Workers and Jobs Using Network Theory. James Fogel and Bernardo Modenesi.
• 12:10PM Invited IV: Hyejin Youn
• 12:50PM Lunch Break
• 1:30PM Invited V: Esteban Moro
• 2:10PM Invited VI: Marta Gonzalez
• 2:50PM Contributed V: How to Govern Facebook. Seth Benzell and Avinash Collis.
• 3:10PM Contributed VI: The network limits of infectious disease control via occupation-based targeting. Demetris Avraam, Nick Obradovich, Niccolò Pescetelli, Manuel Cebrian and Alex Rutherford.
• 3:30PM Break
• 3:50PM Invited VII: Daniel Rock
• 4:30PM Contributed VII: Measuring Fraudulent Transactions On Complex Economic Networks Using Optimality Gap. Danilo Bernardineli and Wenjia Hu.
• 4:50PM Contributed VIII: Local connections drive global structure for technological innovation. Dion O’Neale, Demival Vasques Filho and Shaun Hendy.
• 5:10PM Invited VIII: Jiang Zhang

If you want to attend, you need to register to the Networks21 conference (deadline on June 20th) and then you will receive a Zoom link to the event.

I don’t know about you, but I’m very excited to see all of this! The official page of the satellite has more information for you.

Continue Reading

NetSci is a conference bringing together everybody interested in network science every year. As usual, I showcase the things that most impressed me during my visit. The usual disclaimer applies: I am but a man^{[citation needed]} and NetSci has so many parallel sessions. If I didn’t mention your talk, chances are that’s because I couldn’t duplicate myself to attend!

Starting from the keynote/plenary talks, I think the one standing our for me this year was Eleanor Power. She presented her field work on the cohesive role played by religion in India. By means of network analysis, she showed that indeed there are some strong effects in the social wiring associated with attending or not attending monthly and seasonal celebrations. This is absolutely superb research not only because it is a great application of network analysis to the real world, nor because it goes beyond the study of WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic) culture. It also speaks to me deeply, given my interest in the powerful role memes and culture play in shaping the astounding success — and, possibly, the future apocalyptic failure — of human beings as a species. Think about the best of Joe Henrich, Slate Star Codex, and The Elephant in the Brain all wrapped up in the neat package of a 40 minutes talk.

The Erdös-Rényi prize, awarded to a prominent network scientist under 40, went to Tiago Peixoto. It’s difficult to choose the best among all the great contributions Tiago gave to the field. Since I have a soft spot for practical advances — I’m a computer scientist at heart, after all –, I’m going to mention that Tiago is the engine behind the graph-tool library. graph-tool includes a variety of network algorithms and it’s wicked fast.

Rather than crowning career achievements as the Erdös-Rényi prize, the Euler award goes to a specific discovery. The first awardee was Raissa D’Souza for her discovery of the properties of explosive percolation. This is a big deal, because it shows that a certain class of transitions in network can be abrupt. Think about the collapse of a power grid: you certainly don’t want that to happen at the failure of a single link. Yet, Raissa proved that there are scenarios in which that can happen: failures can propagate without noticeable effects for a while until BAM!: you’re screwed.

And, since we’re talking about prestigious prizes, I shouldn’t forget the Zachary Karate Club Trophy, going to the first researcher including the Zachary Karate Club network in their presentation. The competition gets hotter and hotter at every conference. The new trophy holder is Emma Towlson.

The dinner banquet was special and touching. Emily Bernard shared her experience and inquiry into American culture. You should really check out her book Black is the Body. Sometimes we need a reminder that, when we perform social network analysis, our nodes are actual people. They have dreams, fears and hopes, they’re alive and active human beings. Emily did well in reminding us about that.

Concluding the part about plenary events: lighting talks. It’s getting tiring every year mentioning Max Schich, but the format really suits him like a glove. He’s truly a Herzog in a sea of Al Gores. Al Gore is great, but sometimes your really need something that stands out. Max talked about the origin of network science, reconnecting it not to Euler, but to Leibniz.  Far from being nitpicking, this is just the starting point of the broader adventure into the creation myths of different branches of science and culture. The talk was a sample of the first chapter of his “Cultural Interaction” book and, in case you were wondering, yes: I think you should read it (once it gets out).

Yours truly was at NetSci with the mission of spreading the word about his paper Functional Structures of US State Governments, a collaboration with Laszlo Barabasi, Steve Kosack, Ricardo Hausmann, Kim Albrecht and Evann Smith. If you want to read more about it, you can check my previous post.

As for the contributed talks that caught my eye? Here is a brief summary:

“The hidden constraints on worker mobility” by Morgan Frank. Morgan analyzed data from O-Net, connecting occupations with the skills they require. He showed there are topological constraints that make it hard for people to retrain out of their occupations. (Why would they want to? Oh, I don’t know, maybe because we’re automating and delegating everything to our new AI overlords?)

“Finding Over- and Under-represented Pathways in Higher Order Networks” by Tim Larock. This was only one of a series of talks about higher order networks. Higher order dynamics means dynamics “with memory”: the next state of your system doesn’t depend only on the current state, but also on an arbitrarily long window into the past. Think about passengers in a flight network: the abundance of connecting flights makes it unlikely for paths like A -> B -> A to happen. Tim showed some neat ways to deal with these situations.

“Scale-free Networks Well Done” by Ivan Voitalov. Just like Petter Holme, I’m a sucker for well-executed steak puns in paper titles. Ivan presented a new chapter over the controversy on how to fit power law degree distributions and whether scale free networks are truly as ubiquitous as some of us believe. Ivan provided some evidence leaning on the “yes” side. I’m eager to see what’s next from the other camp.

“Quantifying Data Bias in the U.S. Justice System” by Xindi Wang. Xindi presented an analysis of predictive errors you can get when applying machine learning algorithms to support decision tasks such as predicting recidivism, estimating the risk of child abuse, and more. This was a nice extension to Tina Eliassi-Rad‘s excellent plenary talk about machine learning ethical issues.

With this, I bid you farewell. See you soon in Rome, home of NetSci 2020!

Continue Reading

It’s been a while since I wrote a report for a conference I attended and I think it is high time to fix this now. Last week I had the pleasure to be at Complenet, which was hosted by the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University, Boston. I was there to present my work on the meme evolutionary arms race after popularity spikes. Then I had two posters, on my network backboning algorithm — arguably the best way to filter out noise in your network connections, at least according to me 🙂 — and how to detect the degree of hierarchy of your directed networks.

Complenet was a great occasion to reconnect with fun and impossibly smart people like Laszlo, Aaron, Isabel and Gourab. I also had the occasion to talk with new people and learn about the amazing things they are doing. A particular shout out to Ieke De Vries — who works on networks of criminal activities — and Carolina Mattsson — who tracks down money flows in complex networks.

One advantage of small conferences like Complenet over humongous Goliaths like NetSci is that they only have a plenary session, and so you can actually see everything instead of living in the constant fear of missing out on something. I am particularly enthusiastic about the plenary talk by David Lazer. He had put together a very interesting study, connecting Twitter accounts to voting records to show the typical characteristics of accounts spreading fake news on Twitter. I’m not going to talk about Fernanda Viégas & Martin Wattenberg‘s talk on visualizing deep learning here. As usual it was absurdly good, but I already sung their praise in the past and I feel I have to start diversifying.

For the rest of the first day, the two talks that caught my attention were the ones of Megha Padi and Alessio Cardillo (in collaboration with Jesus Gomez-Gardeñes). Megha showed us a way to use networks for the difficult problem of genetic mutations causing diseases in humans. As you probably know, multiple genes are involved in each of our traits, and they interact with each other. It follows that, often, diseases are caused by an ensemble of perturbations in the genetic code. With her ALPACA method, one can create communities of interacting genes to shed some light on these interactions.

Alessio described a network model, where agents have to decide whether to vaccinate or not. It is important to understand how the no-vax movement works and why it can arise. Alessio shows that there are scenarios in which an individual can dodge the cost of vaccination and still reap its benefits, if you were covered by herd immunity anyway. So, if we want to root out this behavior, we have to stop treating it like a completely irrational thing to do. (By the way, Alessio’s collaborator, Jesus, had another talk on hunter-gatherer social networks and it was also pretty fantastic)

For me, Emma Towlson‘s talk dominated the second day. One of the big theoretical results of the past few years is about network controllability. This is a method to figure out which nodes to influence in a network to get the entire system into the state we desire. Emma et al. showed us that this is theory no more. They took the C. Elegans worm, an organism for which we have a complete neural map, and showed how they can predict which neurons are necessary for its signature sine wave movements and which ones are redundant. Acting on the control neurons will significantly change the worm’s movement patterns.

J.-P. Onnela did double duty: besides his plenary talk on inferring parameters for network models, he also presented a great work on social networks in rural India. This talk is tied for best talk of the third day together with the already mentioned one about hunter-gatherer social networks by Jesus. It also shares some similarities, in that it maps social systems in domains that we rarely study — admittedly we’re a bit too focused on Twitter and Facebook and we overlook actual social networks. JP’s results show that a few factors have a great influence whether a social tie will be created or not, chief among them caste membership.

Two students from Tina Eliassi-Rad‘s group — Tim Larock and Xindi Wang — wrapped up the last day perfectly. Tina and her people are doing great work in the conjunction between network and computer science, and I particularly like their approach to the problem of network completion. When you want to use a network somebody else gathered, you often have the problem that: (i) the network is not complete, and (ii) you don’t know how the sample was collected. Tina’s work helps you complete the network, while being completely agnostic about how the network was created in the first place.

To conclude I want to mention William Grant‘s poster. I had to miss it because I was defending my own posters in the same session, but I had the pleasure to see him present during the poster slam and he was brilliant. He won a Poster Slam award, and deservedly so. But then again, he works with Sebastian Ahnert, so of course he must be good.

See you at the next Complenet!

Continue Reading

As previously announced, this year’s edition of the Netonets event will happen again as a satellite of NetSci. The conference will take place in Indianapolis. The general program of the conference can be found here: http://netsci2017.net/program. I will be there, hosting the satellite just like last year. It will take place Tuesday, June 20th and it will run for the entire day.

We have just completed a tentative program. We are going to have four great invited speakers: Marta C. Gonzales, Romualdo Pastor-Satorras, Gareth Baxter and Paul Hines. We also have five contributed talks. You can find the first draft of the program down here, subject to change in case of conflicting schedules for any of the participants. I will keep up to date in case that happens.

Looking forward to see you in Indianapolis!

Session I

9:00 – 9:15: Room set up
9:15 – 9:30: Welcome from the organizers
9:30 – 10:15: Invited I: Marta Gonzales: “Coupled networks of mobility and energy”

10:15 – 10:45: Coffee Break

Session II

10:45 – 11:30: Invited II: Gareth Baxter: “Critical dynamics of the interdependent network transition”
11:30 – 11:50: Contributed I: Dana Vaknin, Michael Danziger and Shlomo Havlin: “Spreading of localized attacks in spatial multiplex networks”
11:50 – 12:10: Contributed II: Ivana Bachmann and Javier Bustos-Jiménez: “Seven years of interdependent network’s robustness”

12:10 – 14:00: Lunch Break

Session III

14:00 – 14:45: Invited III: Romualdo Pastor-Satorras: “Effects of temporal correlations in social multiplex networks”
14:45 – 15:05: Contributed III: Zhiwei Yang, Jichao Li, Danling Zhao, Yuejin Tan and Kewei Yang: “Operation Loop based Structural Robustness of Combat Networks of Weapon System-of-systems”
15:05 – 15:25: Contributed IV: Shawn Gu and Tijana Milenkovic: “From Homogeneous to Heterogeneous Network Alignment”
15:25 – 15:45: Contributed V: Louis Shekhtman, Michael Danziger, Ivan Bonamassa, Sergey Buldyrev, Vinko Zlatic and Shlomo Havlin: “Secure message passing in networks with communities”

15:45 – 16:10: Coffee Break

Session IV

16:10 – 16:55: Invited IV: Paul Hines: “Increasing interconnectivity between networks can increase network robustness”
16:55 – 17:30: Round table – Open discussion
17:30 – 17:45: Organizers wrap up

Continue Reading

A few weeks ago I had to honor to speak at my group’s  “Global Empowerment Meeting” about my research on data science and economic development. I’m linking here the Youtube video of my talk and my transcript for those who want to follow it. The transcript is not 100% accurate given some last minute edits — and the fact that I’m a horrible presenter 🙂 — but it should be good enough. Enjoy!

We think that the big question of this decade is on data. Data is the building blocks of our modern society. We think in development we are not currently using enough of these blocks, we are not exploiting data nearly as much as we should. And we want to fix that.

Many of the fastest growing companies in the world, and definitely the ones that are shaping the progress of humanity, are data-intensive companies. Here at CID we just want to add the entire world to the party.

So how do we do it? To fix the data problem development literature has, we focus on knowing how the global knowledge building looks like. And we inspect three floors: how does knowledge flow between countries? What lessons can we learn inside these countries? What are the policy implications?

To answer these questions, we were helped by two big data players. The quantity and quality of the data they collect represent a revolution in the economic development literature. You heard them speaking at the event: they are MasterCard – through their Center for Inclusive Growth – and Telefonica.

Let’s start with MasterCard, they help us with the first question: how does knowledge flow between countries? Credit card data answer to that. Some of you might have a corporate issued credit card in your wallet right now. And you are here, offering your knowledge and assimilating the knowledge offered by the people sitting at the table with you. The movements of these cards are movements of brains, ideas and knowledge.

When you aggregate this at the global level you can draw the map of international knowledge exchange. When you have a map, you have a way to know where you are and where you want to be. The map doesn’t tell you why you are where you are. That’s why CID builds something better than a map.

We are developing a method to tell why people are traveling. And reasons are different for different countries: equity in foreign establishments like the UK, trade partnerships like Saudi Arabia, foreign greenfield investments like Taiwan.

Using this map, it is easy to envision where you want to go. You can find countries who have a profile similar to yours and copy their best practices. For Kenya, Taiwan seems to be the best choice. You can see that, if investments drive more knowledge into a country, then you should attract investments. And we have preliminary results to suggest whom to attract: the people carrying the knowledge you can use.

The Product Space helps here. If you want to attract knowledge, you want to attract the one you can more easily use. The one connected to what you already know. Nobody likes to build cathedrals in a desert. More than having a cool knowledge building, you want your knowledge to be useful. And used.

There are other things you can do with international travelers flows. Like tourism. Tourism is a great export: for many countries it is the first export. See these big portion of the exports of Zimbabwe or Spain? For them tourism would look like this.

Tourism is hard to pin down. But it is easier with our data partners. We can know when, where and which foreigners spend their money in a country. You cannot paint pictures as accurate as these without the unique dataset MasterCard has.

Let’s go to our second question: what lessons can we learn from knowledge flows inside a country? Telefonica data is helping answering this question for us. Here we focus on a test country: Colombia. We use anonymized call metadata to paint the knowledge map of Colombia, and we discover that the country has its own knowledge departments. You can see them here, where each square is a municipality, connecting to the ones it talks to. These departments correlate only so slightly with the actual political boundaries. But they matter so much more.

In fact, we asked if these boundaries could explain the growth in wages inside the country. And they seem to be able to do it, in surprisingly different ways. If you are a poor municipality in a rich state in Colombia, we see your wage growth penalized. You are on a path of divergence.

However, if you are a poor municipality and you talk to rich ones, we have evidence to show that you are on a path of convergence: you grow faster than you expect to. Our preliminary results seem to suggest that being in a rich knowledge state matters.

So, how do you use this data and knowledge? To do so you have to drill down at the city level. We look not only at communication links, but also at mobility ones. We ask if a city like Bogota is really a city, or different cities in the same metropolitan area. With the data you can draw four different “mobility districts”, with a lot of movements inside them, and not so many across them.

The mobility districts matter, because combining mobility and economic activities we can map the potential of a neighborhood, answering the question: if I live here, how productive can I be? A lot in the green areas, not so much in the red ones.

With this data you can reshape urban mobility. You know where the entrance barriers to productivity are, and you can destroy them. You remodel your city to include in its productive structure people that are currently isolated by commuting time and cost. These people have valuable skills and knowhow, but they are relegated in the informal sector.

So, MasterCard data told us how knowledge flows between countries. Telefonica data showed the lessons we can learn inside a country. We are left with the last question: what are the policy implications?

So far we have mapped the landscape of knowledge, at different levels. But to hike through it you need a lot of equipment. And governments provide part of that equipment. Some in better ways than others.

To discover the policy implications, we unleashed a data collector program on the Web. We wanted to know how the structure of the government in the US looks like. Our program returned us a picture of the hierarchical organization of government functions. We know how each state structures its own version of this hierarchy. And we know how all those connections fit together in the union, state by state. We are discovering that the way a state government is shaped seems to be the result of two main ingredients: where a state is and how its productive structure looks like.

We want to establish that the way a state expresses its government on the Web reflects the way it actually performs its functions. We seem to find a positive answer: for instance having your environmental agencies to talk with each other seems to work well to improve your environmental indicators, as recorded by the EPA. Wiring organization when we see positive feedback and rethinking them when we see a negative one is a direct consequence of this Web investigation.

I hope I was able to communicate to you the enthusiasm CID discovered in the usage of big data. Zooming out to gaze at the big picture, we start to realize how the knowledge building looks like. As the building grows, so does our understanding of the world, development and growth. And here’s the punchline of CID: the building of knowledge grows with data, but the shape it takes is up to what we make of this data. We chose to shape this building with larger doors, so that it can be used to ensure a more inclusive world.

By the way, the other presentations of my session were great, and we had a nice panel after that. You can check out the presentations in the official Center for International Development Youtube channel. I’m embedding the panel’s video below:

Continue Reading

Another NetSci edition went by, as interconnected as ever. This year we got to enjoy Northeast Asia, a new scenario for us network scientists, and an appropriate one: many new faces popped up both among speakers and attendees. Seoul was definitely what NetSci needed at this time. I want to spend just a few words about what impressed me the most during this trip — well, second most after what Koreans did with their pizzas: that is unbeatable. Let’s go chronologically, starting with the satellites.

You all know I was co-organizing the one on Networks of networks (you didn’t? Then scroll down a bit and get informed!). I am pleased with how things went: the talks we gathered this year were most excellent. Space constraints don’t allow me to give everyone the attention they deserve, but I want to mention two. First is Yong-Yeol Ahn, who was the star of this year. He gave four talks at the conference — provided I haven’t miscounted — and his plenary one on the analysis of the Linkedin graph was just breathtaking. At Netonets, he talked about the internal belief network each one of us carries in her own brain, and its relationship with how macro societal behaviors arise in social networks. An original take on networks of networks, and one that spurred the idea: how much are the inner workings of one’s belief network affected by the metabolic and the bio-connectome networks of one own body? Should we study networks of networks of networks? Second, Nitesh Chawla showed us how high order networks unveil real relationships among nodes. The same node can behave like it is many different ones, depending on which of its connections we are considering.

Besides the most awesome networks of networks satellite, other ones caught my attention. Again, space is my tyrant here, so I get to award just one slot, and I would like to give it to Hyejin Youn. Her satellite was on the evolution of technological networks. She does amazing things tracking how the patent network evolved from the depths of 1800 until now. The idea is to find viable innovation paths, and to predict which fields will have the largest impact in the future.

When it comes to the plenary sessions, I think Yang-Yu Liu stole the spotlight with a flashy presentation about the microcosmos everybody carries in their guts. The analysis of the human microbiome is a very hot topic right now, and it pleases me to know that there is somebody working on a network perspective of it. Besides scientific merits, whoever extensively quotes Minute Earth videos — bonus points for it being the one about poop transplants — has my eternal admiration. I also want to highlight Ginestra Bianconi‘s talk. She has an extraordinary talent in bringing to network science the most cutting edge aspects of physics. Her line of research combining quantum gravity and network geometry is a dream come true for a physics nerd like myself. I always wished to see advanced physics concepts translated into network terms, but I never had the capacity to do so: now I just have to sit back and wait for Ginestra’s next paper.

What about contributed talks? The race for the second best is very tight. The very best was clearly mine on the link between mobility and communication patterns, about which I showed a scaling relationship connecting them (paper – post). I will be magnanimous and spare you all the praises I could sing of it. Enough joking around, let’s move on. Juyong Park gave two fantastic talks on networks and music. This was a nice breath of fresh air for digital humanities: this NetSci edition was orphan of the great satellite chaired by Max Schich. Juyong showed how to navigate through collaboration networks on classical music CDs, and through judge biases in music competitions. By the way, Max dominated — as expected — the lighting talk session, showing some new products coming from his digital humanities landmark published last year in Science.  Tomomi Kito was also great: she borrowed the tools of economic complexity and shifted her focus from the macro analysis of countries to the micro analysis of networks of multinational corporations. A final mention goes to Roberta Sinatra. Her talk was about her struggle into making PhD committees recognize that what she is doing is actually physics. It resonates with my personal experience, trying to convince hiring committees that what I’m doing is actually computer science. Maybe we should all give up the struggle and just create a network science department.

And so we get to the last treat of the conference: the Erdos-Renyi prize, awarded to the most excellent network researcher under the age of 40. This year it went to Aaron Clauset, and this pleases me for several reasons. First, because Aaron is awesome, and he deserves it. Second, because he is the first computer scientist who is awarded the prize, and this just gives me hope that our work too is getting recognized by the network gurus. His talk was fantastic on two accounts.

For starters, he presented his brand new Index of Complex Networks. The interface is pretty clunky, especially on my Ubuntu Firefox, but that does not hinder the usefulness of such an instrument. With his collaborators, Aaron collected the most important papers in the network literature, trying to find a link to a publicly available network. If they were successful, that link went in the index, along with some metadata about the network. This is going to be a prime resource for network scientists, both for starting new projects and for the sorely needed task of replicating previous results.

Replication is the core of the second reason I loved Aaron’s talk. Once he collected all these networks, for fun he took a jab at some of the dogmas of networks science. The main one everybody knows is: “Power-laws are everywhere”. You can see where this is going: the impertinent Colorado University boy showed that yes, power-laws are very common… among the 5-10% of networks in which it is possible to find them. Not so much “everywhere” any more, huh? This was especially irreverent given that not so long before Stefan Thurner gave a very nice plenary talk featuring a carousel of power laws. I’m not picking sides on the debate — I feel hardly qualified in doing so. I just think that questioning dearly held results is always a good thing, to avoid fooling ourselves into believing we’ve reached an objective truth.

Among the non-scientific merits of the conference, I talked with Vinko Zlatic about the Croatian government on the brink of collapse, spread the search for a new network scientist by the Center for International Development, and discovered that Korean pizzas are topped with almonds (you didn’t really think I was going to let slip that pizza reference at the beginning of the post, did you?). And now I made myself sad: I wish there was another NetSci right away, to shove my brain down into another blender of awesomeness.  Oh well, there are going to be plenty of occasions to do so. See you maybe in Dubrovnik, Tel-Aviv or Indianapolis?

Continue Reading

As announced in the previous post, the symposium on networks of networks is happening in less than two weeks: May 31st @ 9AM, room Dongkang C of the K-Hotel Seoul, South Korea. Przemek Kazienko, Gregorio D’Agostino and I have a fantastic program and set of speakers to keep you entertained on multilayer, interdependent and multislice networks. Take a look for yourself!

9:00 – 9:15: Room set up
9:15 – 9:30: Welcome from the organizers
9:30 – 10:15: Invited I: Yong-Yeol Ahn: Dynamics of social network of belief networks
10:15 – 11:00: Invited II: Luca Maria Aiello: The Nature of Social Links

Remember to register to the main NetSci conference if you want to attend.

Incidentally, the end of May is going to be a rather busy period for me. Besides co-organizing Netonets and speaking at the main Netsci conference, I’m going to present also at the Core50 conference in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, on the role of social and mobility networks in shaping the economic growth of a country. Thanks to Jean-Charles Delvenne for inviting me!

I hope to see many of you there!

Continue Reading

EDIT: Deadlines & speakers updated. Submission deadline is on April 27th, notification on April 29th.

Dear readers of this blog — yes, both of you –: it’s that time of the year again. As tradition dictates, I’m organizing the Networks of Networks symposium, satellite event of the NetSci conference.

Networks of networks are structures in which the nodes may be connected through different relations. They can represent multifaceted social interaction, critical infrastructure and complex relational data structures. In the symposium, we are looking for a diversity of research contributions revolving around networks of networks of any kind: in social media, in infrastructure, in culture. The call for contributed talks is OPEN, and you can submit your abstract here: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=non2016

The deadline for submissions is April 15th, 2016 April 27th, 2016, just a month from now. We will notify acceptance by April 22nd, 2016 April 29th, 2016.

Here’s my handy guide to few of the many reasons to come:

• Networks of networks are awesome, a hot topic in network science and a lot of super smart people work on them. You wouldn’t pass the opportunity to mingle with them, would you?
• We have a lineup of outstanding confirmed keynotes this year — truth to be told, we have that every year:
  • Michael Danziger (Bar Ilan University)
  • Jianxi Gao (Northeastern University)
  • Yong-Yeol Ahn (Indiana University)
  • Luca Maria Aiello (Yahoo)
  • Tomasz Kajdanowicz (Wroclaw University of Technology)
  • Nitesh Chawla (University of Notre Dame)
• This year NetSci will take place at the K-Hotel, Seoul, Korea (South, whew…). You really should not miss this occasion to visit such fascinating place.

The Networks of Networks symposium will be held on May 31st, 2016. The full conference, including all satellites, runs from May 30th to June 3rd. You can find all relevant information for the conference in the official NetSci website. Our symposium has a website too: check it out. In it, you will find also the fundamental information about all the people organizing this event with me: without them none of this would be possible. Here they are:

• Gregorio D’Agostino (ENEA)
• Przemysław Kazienko (Wroclaw University of Technology)
• Antonio Scala (CNR)

And also a list of other people, helping with their ideas, time and enthusiasm:

• Matteo Magnani
• Ian Dobson
• Luca Rossi
• Leonardo Duenas-Osorio
• Dino Pedreschi
• Guido Caldarelli
• Vito Latora

Hope to see many of you in Korea!

Continue Reading