I had an absolutely wonderful time at the Complex Networks 2018 conference last week in Cambridge, UK. I learned a lot and got caught up a bit with all the amazing work that’s going within complex network analysis and see some of the great new young researchers in the field.
At the community detection sessions, I also saw several talks that drew on our work on Link Clustering, expanding and building on those ideas. Now don’t get me wrong: That work is well cited, so I know people have been reading it. But my sense is that most of the citations are of the type “This is also something one could do” or from people applying the algorithm. Those are both great (and a much better fate than what befalls most of my papers), but it is still extra exciting to see people adopting, refining, and developing the ideas – using them for their own work with community detection methods!
Another exciting development was to see how lots of people are starting to apply machine learning (including embeddings, etc) to networks.
Finally, I also got to give my own keynote about our recent paper on the Chaperone Effect in Scientific Publishing. It was a brand new talk (since the paper just came out 2 days prior), but judging from the Twitter reaction, people liked it 🙂
sune lehmann 