NetSci 2013: Nine reasons to go (Reason 2)

Following up on past promises, here’s reason two that I think NetSci 2013 is going to excellent.

Reason 2: The NetSci School

This year, the NetSci school is going to be something special. So even if you’re not yet a bona fide network science insider who’s wise to inside jokes about Zachary’s Karate Club, NetSci 2013 is going to be a great conference to visit – a great place to learn about networks and network analysis.

Great school lecturers: First of all, the big man – godfather of netsci – László Barabási himself will teach at the school, taking his amazing (and free) new textbook about network science on the road. Also teaching at the school: monsieur Renaud Lambiotte and sensei Naoki Masuda who’ll be address the sizzling hot topics of multiplexity and dynamics in complex networks

Update your programming skills: Secondly, we’ve included tutorials on some of the programming languages and visualization tools most important to network science. So even if you’re a seasoned researcher, the school will have something for you. And to put it humbly, I think we’ve managed to get the best of the best:

• Aric Hagberg will talk about NetworkX. NetworkX is a Python language software package for the creation, manipulation, and study of the structure, dynamics, and functions of complex networks. Besides being Deputy Director for the theoretical division of the Center for Nonlinear Studies at LANL, Aric is the primary developer of NetworkX, so we’re in for a treat.
• Sébastien Heymann will lead the tutorial on Gephi, an open source interactive visualization and exploration software for complex networks. Sébastien is a leader of the Gephi project and the administrator of the Gephi Consortium. He will include coverage of the newest version’s ability to analyze and visualize evolving networks, so that one shouldn’t be missed.
• Finally, Charles Pooh will address the new Network Science tools in Wolfram Research‘s Mathematica. Charles is is a senior kernel developer at Wolfram and in charge of the graph theory package (among other things) in Mathematica. Mathematica’s tools for networks have received a major upgrade in the past few years, so Charles’ tutorial is sure to blow a mind or two.

I’m a huge fan of everything above, so I couldn’t be more excited for everyone to experience the school.

Reason 2.1: The school venue

We’ll have the school at DTU, the Technical University of Denmark. in the Oticon Hall, see below.

As you might be able to make out, that’s another great venue – and has the added benefit of being right next to the satellite workshops. The fact that everything is in one place means that you’ll be able to move back and forth between the school and satellites – and we hope that this will make the first two days of the conference will feel like a truly integrated part of the conference (with everyone being able to grab lunch in the same area, etc). So don’t wait – go and register right now.

And don’t forget to check out part one of this series.