Petter Holme in Copenhagen this Friday

Short notice, but exciting news. Network science legend Petter Holme will be in Copenhagen this Friday, October 30th, and he’s giving the main talk at the Pioneer Centre for AI’s Last Fridays Talks. This month’s edition is hosted by the Networks & Graphs collaboratory.

If you work on networks, you already know Petter. If you work on temporal networks, you have almost certainly cited him, because his review with Jari Saramäki is more or less the paper that established temporal networks as a new field. He is Professor of Network Science and Computational Social Science at Aalto University, with earlier stops at Tokyo Institute of Technology and Sungkyunkwan University in Korea, and more than 220 papers on everything from epidemics on networks to the structure of social systems. Petter also has an MA in Chinese.¹

Portrait of Petter Holme in the style of a Dutch Golden Age painting — Petter as painted by one of the Dutch masters.

Petter and I go way back. We co-chaired NetSci 2013 here in Copenhagen, we’ve written papers together, he has examined a worrying fraction of my PhD students, and he was a guest on my podcast back when I still had the energy to run one.² His talks are always thought-provoking and orthogonal to everything else!

This one sounds especially fun. The title is “Social decision-making: human/machine, individual/collective, lab/wild, present/future”, and here is the abstract:

In 1907, Georg Simmel described society as a fabric woven from myriads of inconspicuous social relations and decisions. A century later, we have the technologies to measure these threads, describe the weaving process, and replicate it artificially. In this talk, I will start with our straightforward comparison of human and machine decision-making in the lab, then move outward on a spiraling trajectory toward more metaphysical topics. Along the way, I will cover emergent reputations among sandboxed, roleplaying AI agents, and musings on collective stupidity as a force balancing out collective intelligence, all with a Simmelian eye to the micro/macro transition.

“Collective stupidity as a force balancing out collective intelligence” – how great is that!?

Before Petter, two short talks from my own group, which I’m equally excited about. Christian Djurhuus, PhD student at SODAS and P1, will talk about what the people around us add to life-course prediction. That is, whether knowing someone’s network (family, colleagues, neighbors) improves our ability to predict how their life unfolds, on top of what we can already get from their own records. Then Abbas K. Rizi, former postdoc in my group at DTU, will talk about homophily in social systems: the tendency to connect with people like ourselves, and how it shapes epidemics.

The practical details:

Time: Friday, October 30th, 14:30–17:00
Place: Auditorium 1, Copenhagen University Library, City Campus, Gothersgade 140, 1123 Copenhagen K
Program: 14:30 Christian Djurhuus, 14:45 Abbas K. Rizi, 15:00 Petter Holme, 16:00 drinks and discussion
Registration: free, but please sign up via the event page

Note that the drinks afterwards are at P1 itself, a short walk from the library. Hope to see you there.

Notes

His other degrees are a PhD in theoretical physics from Umeå and a docent in biological physics from KTH, which is a more conventional path into network science, but the whole package is pretty darn unique and amazing. ↩
Too Lazy to Read the Paper, episode 6, with Gourab Ghoshal: on YouTube. It holds up. ↩