Speakers

Duncan J. Watts

Stevens University Professor and Director, Computational Social Science Lab at the University of Pennsylvania

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Duncan Watts is the Stevens University Professor and twenty-third Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to his appointment at the Annenberg School, he holds faculty appointments in the Department of Computer and Information Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and the Department of Operations, Information and Decisions in the Wharton School, where he is the inaugural Rowan Fellow. He holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Sociology in the School of Arts & Sciences. He directs the Computational Social Science Lab at Penn. Prior to joining Penn, he was a principal researcher at Microsoft Research and a founding member of the MSR-NYC lab. He is also an AD White Professor at Large at Cornell University. Prior to joining MSR in 2012, he was from 2000-2007 a professor of Sociology at Columbia University, and then a principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research, where he directed the Human Social Dynamics group.

His research on social networks and collective dynamics has appeared in a wide range of journals, from Nature, Science, and Physical Review Letters to the American Journal of Sociology and Harvard Business Review, and has been recognized by the 2009 German Physical Society Young Scientist Award for Socio and Econophysics, the 2013 Lagrange-CRT Foundation Prize for Complexity Science, and the 2014 Everett Rogers M. Rogers Award.

He is also the author of three books: Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (W.W. Norton, 2003) and Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness (Princeton University Press, 1999), and most recently Everything is Obvious: Once You Know The Answer (Crown Business, 2011)

Tina Eliassi-Rad

Professor & The Inaugural Joseph E. Aoun Chair, Khoury College of Computer Sciences, Northeastern University

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Tina Eliassi-Rad is a Professor of Computer Science at Northeastern University in Boston, MA. She is also on the faculty of Northeastern's Network Science Institute. Prior to joining Northeastern, Tina was an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Rutgers University; and before that she was a Member of Technical Staff and Principal Investigator at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Tina earned her Ph.D. in Computer Sciences (with a minor in Mathematical Statistics) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research is rooted in data mining and machine learning; and spans theory, algorithms, and applications of massive data from networked representations of physical and social phenomena. Tina's work has been applied to personalized search on the World-Wide Web, statistical indices of large-scale scientific simulation data, fraud detection, mobile ad targeting, and cyber situational awareness. Her algorithms have been incorporated into systems used by the government and industry (e.g., IBM System G Graph Analytics) as well as open-source software (e.g., Stanford Network Analysis Project). In 2010, she received an Outstanding Mentor Award from the Office of Science at the US Department of Energy. For more details, visit http://eliassi.org.

Michelle Girvan

Professor in the Department of Physics and the Institute for Physical Science and Technology at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD)

Michelle Girvan is a Professor in the Department of Physics and the Institute for Physical Science and Technology at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is also a member of the External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Her research operates at the intersection of statistical physics, nonlinear dynamics, and computer science and has applications to social, biological, and technological systems. More specifically, her work focuses on complex networks and often falls within the fields of computational biology and sociophysics. While some of the research is purely theoretical, Girvan has become increasingly involved in using empirical data to inform and validate mathematical models.

Mark Newman

Anatol Rapoport Distinguished University Professor of Physics, Department of Physics and Center for the Study of Complex Systems, University of Michigan

Talk Title: Network structure of online dating

Bio: Professor Newman's research is on statistical physics and the theory of complex systems, with a primary focus on networked systems, including social, biological, and computer networks, which are studied using a combination of empirical methods, analysis, and computer simulation. Among other topics, he and his collaborators have worked on mathematical models of network structure, computer algorithms for analyzing network data, and applications of network theory to a wide variety of specific problems, including the spread of disease through human populations and the spread of computer viruses among computers, the patterns of collaboration of scientists and business-people, citation networks of scientific articles and law cases, network navigation algorithms and the design of distributed databases, and the robustness of networks to the failure of their nodes.

Professor Newman also has a research interest in cartography and was, along with collaborators, one of the developers of a new type of map projection or "cartogram" that can be used to represent geographic data by varying the sizes of states, countries, or regions.

Professor Newman is the author of several books, including a recent textbook on network theory and a popular book of cartography.

Paul Hines

Vice President of Power Systems at EnergyHub

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He received the Ph.D. in Engineering and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University in 2007 and M.S. (2001) and B.S. (1997) degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington and Seattle Pacific University, respectively. He is currently an Associate Professor, and the L. Richard Fisher Professor, in the Electrical and Biomedical Engineering Department, with a secondary appointment in the Dept. of Computer Science, at the University of Vermont, and a member of the adjunct research faculty at the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center. He is also co-founder and President of a cleantech startup company known as Packetized Energy. Formerly he worked at the U.S. National Energy Technology Laboratory, the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Alstom ESCA (now Alstom Grid) and for Black and Veatch. He currently serves as the vice-chair of the IEEE PES Working Group on Cascading Failure. He is a National Science Foundation CAREER award winner and his research on blackouts has been featured in Science magazine and Scientific American.

Sidney Redner

Professor and Science Board member, Santa Fe Institute

Sid Redner received an A.B. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1972 and a Ph.D. in Physics from MIT in 1977. After a postdoctoral year at the University of Toronto, Sid joined the physics faculty at Boston University in 1978. During his 36 years at BU, he served as Acting Chair during two separate terms and also served as Departmental Chair. Sid has been a Visiting Scientist at Schlumberger-Doll Research in the mid 80's, the Ulam Scholar at LANL in 2004, and a sabbatical visitor at Université Paul Sabatier in Toulouse France and at Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie in Paris.

Sid's research interests lie broadly in non-equilibrium statistical physics and its applications to a variety of phenomena. In recent years, he has worked extensively on the structure of complex networks, where he has developed new models and new methods to elucidate network structures. He has also devoted considerable effort to formulate and solve physics-based models of social dynamics. He continues to investigate problems of phase-ordering kinetics and has advanced our understanding of zero-temperature coarsening in Ising and Potts models. Sid has an enduring interest in diffusion processes and their applications in the natural world and in stochastic transport processes in disordered porous media. As part of this latter line of research, he investigates fundamental aspects of first-passage processes.

Sid has published more than 250 articles in major peer-reviewed journals, as well as two books: the monograph A Guide to First-Passage Processes (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001) and the graduate text, jointly with P. L. Krapivsky and E. Ben-Naim, A Kinetic View of Statistical Physics (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010). He also a member of the Editorial Board for the Journal of Informetrics, an Associate Editor for the Journal of Statistical Physics, and a Divisional Associate Editor for Physical Review Letters.

Peter Sheridan Dodds

Director, Vermont Complex Systems Institute and Professor, Department of Computer Science

Peter's research focuses on system-level, big data problems in many areas including language and stories, sociotechnical systems, Earth sciences, biology, and ecology. Peter has created (and constantly evolves) a series of complex systems courses starting with Principles of Complex Systems. He co-runs the Computational Story Lab with Chris Danforth.

Vittoria Colizza

Director of Research at INSERM (French National Institute for Health and Medical Research) and Sorbonne Université, Faculty of Medicine, in the Pierre Louis Institute of Epidemiology and Public Health

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Vittoria Colizza completed her undergraduate studies in Physics at the University of Rome Sapienza, Italy, in 2001 and received her PhD in Statistical and Biological Physics at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, in 2004. She then spent 3 years at the Indiana University School of Informatics in Bloomington, IN, USA, first as a post-doc and then as a Visiting Assistant Professor. In 2007 she joined the ISI Foundation in Turin, Italy, where she started a new lab after being awarded a Starting Independent Career Grant in Life Sciences by the European Research Council Ideas Program (more info on the EpiFor project webpage). In 2011 Vittoria joined the Inserm (French National Institute for Health and Medical Research) in Paris where she now leads the EPIcx lab working on the characterization and modeling of the spread of emerging infectious diseases, by integrating methods of complex systems with statistical physics approaches, computational sciences, geographic information systems, and mathematical epidemiology. In 2017 she obtained the French academic degree HDR (Habilitation a Diriger des Recherches), and was promoted Director of Research at Inserm.

Emma K. Towlson

Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary, Computer Science Department

I am an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Calgary, with interests in the emerging field of Network Neuroscience. I have a Masters in Mathematics and Physics from the University of Warwick (2011), and received my PhD from the University of Cambridge (2015). My expertise lies in investigating the topology and organisational principles of various kinds of brain networks, from C. elegans to mouse to human. I am currently working on applying and adapting techniques from network control theory to probe neuronal or near-neuronal level wiring diagrams from smaller organisms. I co-instruct Phys 5116: Complex Networks alongside Prof. Albert-László Barabási, and am invested in bringing Network Science approaches to broader audiences and educational settings.

Daniel B. Larremore

Assistant Professor, Univ. Colorado Boulder BioFrontiers Institute & Dept. of Computer Science

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My research focuses on developing methods of networks, dynamical systems, and statistical inference, to solve problems in social and biological systems. I try to keep a tight loop between data and theory, and learn a lot from confronting models and algorithms with real problems.

I obtained my PhD in Applied Mathematics from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2012, advised by Juan G. Restrepo, after which I spent three years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health studying the genetic epidemiology of malaria in the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics. I then joined the Santa Fe Institute as an Omidyar Fellow until 2017, when I joined the faculty at the University of Colorado Boulder in the Department of Computer Science and the BioFrontiers Institute.

Networks and theory - The processes that generate complex networks leave hints about themselves in the patterns of edges, and the relationships between those patterns and vertex metadata. I work on mathematical descriptions of graph ensembles, inference of community structures, vertex ordering or ranking, and using metadata to better understand network formation.

Malaria's antigenic variation and evolution - The var genes of the malaria parasite P. falciparum evolve according to complicated and unknown rules, with selective pressures at multiple scales both within hosts and between hosts. I use tools from applied math and statistical physics to understand the structural and evolutionary constraints on var gene evolution, and its their relationships with parasite virulence, population structure, and epidemiology.
Academic labor market dynamics - PhDs become faculty each year, but the influences of prestige, advisor, gender, publication record, among other factors, on actual hiring outcomes are not well known, even within individual fields. I investigate inequalities and dynamics of the academic labor market through large-scale data collection and generative models.

Puck Rombach

Associate Professor at the Department of Mathematics & Statistics and the Vermont Complex Systems Institute at the University of Vermont

My work bridges gaps between the pure and applied sides of graph/network theory. I have recently worked on problems related to

-Graph coloring
-Random graphs
-Algorithms and complexity
-Graph representations of matroids
-Crime network modeling
-Core-periphery/centrality detection in networks.

Eleanor Power

Associate Professor, Department of Methodology, London School of Economics

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Eleanor Power is an Associate Professor in the Department of Methodology. She completed her PhD in Anthropology at Stanford University in 2015. Prior to joining LSE in 2017, she was an Omidyar Postdoctoral Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute.

Research interests:

Eleanor is an anthropologist interested in how religious belief, practice, and identity interact with and shape interpersonal relationships.

She studies these dynamics through fieldwork conducted in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, primary among which is social network analysis. Her work is informed by signaling theory and the wider scholarship of human behavioral ecology. She is interested in the dynamics of social networks, especially relative to the factors that influence cooperation, competition, trust, and prestige. More generally, Eleanor is interested in investigating questions regarding: the role of religion in society, the interaction between costly signaling and cooperation, gender differences in prominence and social capital, and the dynamics of gossip and social censure.

C. Brandon Ogbunu

Assistant Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, Yale University

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C. Brandon Ogbunu is an Assistant Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at Yale University. He is an evolutionary systems biologist, and uses experimental evolution, mathematical modeling, and computational biology to better understand the underlying causes and consequences of disease, across scales: from the biophysics of proteins involved in drug resistance to the social determinants underlying disease. In doing so, he aims to develop theory that enriches our understanding of the evolutionary and ecological underpinnings of disease, while contributing to practical solutions for clinical medicine and public health.

Nicola Perra

Reader in Applied Mathematics at Queen Mary University of London, UK

I carried out my undergraduate studies at the Department of Physics of the University of Cagliari (Italy), where I got my bachelor degree on September 23th, 2005, with the mark of 110/110 cum laude, presenting the thesis Elastic diffusion: Born, Iconale and partial waves approximations.

I got my master degree on Octber 23th , 2007 with the mark of 110/110 cum laude, presenting the thesis Diffusion processes and centrality measures in Complex Networks.

In January 2008 I began my PhD studies at the Department of Physics of the University of Cagliari in the field of Complex Networks Science and Statistical Mechanics. I got my Ph.D. on January 11th, 2011 presenting the thesis Reaction-Diffusion processes on complex networks.

During the period between 3/08 and 11/08 I worked with COSMOLAB in the Research project Community Detection in Infrastructural Networks.

From November 2008 till July 2009 I was Visiting Scholar at the Complex Networks group of the Indiana university in Bloomington, IN, USA.

From July 2009 till August 2011 I was Research Associate at the Center for Complex Networks Systems Research of the Indiana university in Bloomington, IN, USA.

From September 2011 till August 2014 I was Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the Northeastern University in Boston, MA, USA.

From September 2014 till July 2015 I was Associate Research Scientist at the Northeastern University in Boston, MA, USA

From August 2015 till August 2018 I was Senior Lecturer in Network Science at the Business School of Greenwich University, London, UK

In 2017 I was nominated fellow of the ISI Foundation

From September 2018 till 2022 I served as Associate Professor (Reader) in Network Science at the Business School of Greenwich University, London, UK.

I serve as Reader in Applied Mathematics at Queen Mary University of London, UK, Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute, and chair of the British Chapter of the network Society.

Hyejin Youn

Associate Professor at Seoul National University and External Professor at Santa Fe Institute

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I am an associate professor at Seoul National University and an external faculty at Santa Fe Institute. Before Seoul National University, I was an assistant professor at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO). I was a research fellow at Santa Fe Institute and Harvard Kennedy School, and visiting scientist at MIT Media Lab. Before that, I was a senior research fellow at Mathematical Institute at University of Oxford , and Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School; and ran a National Science Foundation grant (USA) to study Technological Change from the Map of Capabilities with Aaron Cluaset, the University of Colorado at Boulder. My PhD is in Statistical Physics at KAIST. I serve on the editorial board of PLOS One.

My research aims to develop a mathematical and computational framework to understand complex systems. These include (see the detail here):
Science of Cities
Pathway of Innovation
Linguistics (Semantic shift)

Please visit my publication page or Google scholar profile for the more details on my publications

Tiago de Paula Peixoto

Professor of Complex Systems and Network Science at Interdisciplinary Transformation University, Austria

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My research focuses on characterizing, identifying and explaining large-scale patterns found in the structure and function of complex network systems — representing diverse phenomena with physical, biological, technological, or social origins — using principled approaches from statistical physics, nonlinear dynamics and Bayesian inference.

Emily Bernard

Julian Lindsay Green & Gold Professor and Carnegie Fellow, Department of English, University of Vermont

Emily Bernard is a professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and was recently named the Julian Lindsay Green & Gold Professor of English. She holds a B. A. and a Ph. D. in American Studies from Yale University. Bernard has received fellowships from the Alphonse A. Fletcher Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Arts Council, and the W. E. B. DuBois Institute at Harvard University. She was the inaugural James Weldon Johnson Senior Research Fellow in African American Studies at Yale University. Her published works include: Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; Some of My Best Friends: Writers on Interracial Friendship, which was chosen by the New York Public Library as a Book for the Teen Age; and Michelle Obama: The First Lady in Photographs, which received a 2010 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work. Her most recent book, Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black and White, was published by Yale University Press in 2012. Bernard’s essays have been reprinted in Best American Essays, Best African American Essays and Best of Creative Nonfiction. An upcoming essay collection, Black is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine, will be published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., in the spring of 2019. A native of Nashville, Tennessee, Emily Bernard has been a faculty member at UVM since 2001.

Check out her new book Black is the Body here.

Brooklyn Bluegrass Collective

The Collective is not so much a band, as it is, well, a collective!

A good way to get a feel for this is to listen to our latest studio release, Brooklyn Bluegrass Collective: Volume 2, which features the musicians with whom we book dozens of events yearly. Also, you can visit our YouTube Channel, where you'll see many different musicians represented. Part of our work is documenting the NYC bluegrass scene through live videos and recordings that we produce.

Our Story
Once upon a time, five friends (Jason Borisoff, Zack Bruce, Jeff Picker, Ellery Marshall, and Sam Barnes) set out to make a record. Needing something to sell at their many gigs around town, all five agreed that a CD is a good place to start. They compiled the tunes, rehearsed the arrangements, and booked the studio time.

After six weeks of rehearsal and tracking, the record was done! And they were happy with it! Lacking a band name, they settled on The Brooklyn Bluegrass Collective. In the weeks and months after the release of "Brooklyn Bluegrass Collective, Volume 1", they realized that the band name they chose could have easily applied to any iteration of the 30 or 40 avid and professional bluegrassers in the NYC area. Zack and Jason began to explore the idea of expanding the recording project to include others from the bluegrass scene, and began work immediately on Brooklyn Bluegrass Collective, Volume 2.

Learning that their individuals goals in the music business were aligned, Zack and Jason formed Positive Spin Records in 2016 to facilitate the recordings, in addition to administering their rapidly-growing wedding and events business.

Banquette Dinner Venue - Mansfield Barn

Location: Mansfield Barn, 3 Irish Farm Rd, Jericho, VT 05465
Time: 17:20 - 21:00 (shuttles provided)
Reservation: If you would like to attend please sign-up during your registration to the NetSci 2019 conference