This week, we’ll have two exciting visitors. Sebastian Ahnert will be visiting on Wednesday, speaking on Compressible components reveal network architectures.

On Thursday we’ll change gears and discuss mobility, modelling, and sensing. For that we’re lucky to have Cecilia Mascolo and her postdoc Neal Lathia visiting, speaking on How can sensor data be used to infer how people feel?

If you’re anywhere near Copenhagen, I highly recommend both talks!

So catching up on recent developments, a big item from last month is that I made the cover of the local university paper DTU avisen – with nice photos and everything.

The best version of the article is only available in Danish [find it here]. Due to a bit of last minute editorial changes, a bunch of errors made their way into the printed version [find it here DK link, GB link (pdf), GB link (html)]

Just a quick post to note that I’m in Boston and will be around for much of the summer (the rest of July and the first part of August). I arrived a bit over a week ago, but have been too busy to update the blog – I guess better late than never. In fact I have a substantial blog-backlog, so expect more activity on the blog over the next few weeks.

I’ll be spending my time at Center for Complex Network Research and the LazerLab. Do send me an email if you’re around and would like to meet up!

Just back from a great NetSci conference at Northwestern University. Aside from being an excellent meeting with plenty of interesting talks and opportunities to meet with old friends, the conference was a reminder that NetSci 2013 is approaching rapidly.

At the conference, Petter Holme and I managed to recruit a great set of new committee members to help organize next year’s conference. In addition to Petter and myself, the organizing team now counts

• Katharina Zweig as the technical chair, responsible for submissions.
• Jan O. Haerter is the chair of registration.
• Isabel Meirelles has graciously promised to do a redesign of the NetSci visual identity.
• Philipp Hövel will be the chair of satellites (so let him know if you’re interested in running a satellite event).
• Bruno Gonçalves is going to be the web chair, responsible for the content of the netsci website.
• In Copenhagen Joachim Mathiesen is organizing all things local.
• And finally, Alan Mislove runs the NetSci web-infrastructure with a steady hand.

With this amazing team, help from the Network Science Society, and a superb venue (see below), I’m sure that NetSci 2013 is well under way. But we could always use more help, so let me know if you have any ideas for how you can help make NetSci 2013 the best ever. We’re also always looking for volunteers to help us run the conference itself.

This week, my collaborator/friend from Barabasilab/award winning physicist, Yong-Yeol Ahn (better know as YY) is visiting the Center for Social Data here at DTU. If you’re anywhere near Copenhagen, I highly recommend you stop by to see his talk!

Time: Thursday, May 24th, 13:00 [details here]

Title: Community structure and flocking of memes in social networks

Abstract: Spreading processes on networks (e.g. epidemic outbreak and information spreading) has been one of the most fundamental topics in network science. Information spreading in social networks has often been described by epidemic spreading models but recent studies demonstrated that some contagions (memes) exhibit fundamentally different pattern, where multiple exposure significantly enhances the transmission probability of the contagion. The co-operativity of a contagion makes the spreading process more sensitive to clustered network structure. Here we investigate the relationship between network communities and spreading of hashtags in a Twitter network.

And if we’re lucky, maybe we can even talk him into speaking a bit about his interesting work on food pairings and molecular gastronomy!

This week I’m visiting the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, participating in the workshop Mathematical Physics of Complex Networks: From Graph Theory to Biological Physics. 

It’s quite the honor to be invited to speak at a conference full of real physicists & bona fide graph theorists (although it’s putting my softening brain hard at work: there seems to be a lot more analytical results here than I’m used to these days).

This week I’m heading out to CompleNet 2012 in Melbourne Florida. It looks like a great conference with Laszlo Barabasi, Robert Bonneau  & Sinan Aral headlining.

The conference will also feature an unreasonably high level of activity by yours truly with duties including an invited talk (8:40 on March 8th), chairing a technical session (on network metrics and models, 10:20 on March 7th), as well as a brief talk at the opening of the art exhibition on The Art of Networks at the local Foosaner Art Museum, about the creation of the TwitterMood visualization.

Hope to see you there if you’re in or around the Sunshine State!