A new chapter in the Nedo Award

Dear Nedoers,

the Nedo Award was a source of pride for the entire NETWORKS Unit community, but now it is time to grow up and go beyond our self-imposed mental borders.
It is a great honour for Nedo to announce that the next winner of the award is not part of the NETWORKS Unit, but she comes from IIT, CNR, in Pisa. So, please welcome in the Nedo Hall Of Fame, Marinella Petrocchi, here in Doha (Qatar) presenting Nedo at the SocInfo2019!

The can is small, but it is there (see the orange circle). In the best Nedo tradition, it does not make any sense to have the Nedo can there.

Congratulations!

Stay tuNEDO!

Newcomers@IMT

Dear Nedoers,

time passes and new slaves students arrive. Next Wednesday 13th November we are going to welcome them. The Honorable Dr. Tiziano Squartini sent the tentative program below of this mini workshop.

We invite you to participate and we hope you will enjoy!
Stay tuNEDO,

Nedo

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9:15 Welcome

 

9:25 Session 1:

• Diego Garlaschelli: Maximum-Entropy Networks (10’)
• Leonardo Ialongo (15’)
• Marzio di Vece (15’)

10:05 Session 2:

• Angelo Facchini: Infrastructural/Urban Networks Analysis (10’)
• Matteo Serafino (15’)

10:30 Session 3:

• Rossana Mastrandrea: Brain Networks Analysis (theory…) (10′)
• Margherita Lalli (15’)

10:55 Coffee break@Pecora Nera

11:20 Session 4:

• Fabio Saracco: Social Networks Analysis (10’)
• Matteo Bruno (15’)
• Tommaso Radicioni (15’)

12:00 Session 5:

• Tommaso Gili: Brain Networks Analysis (…and experiments) (10’)
• Virginio Clemente (15’)

12:25 Session 6:

• Tiziano Squartini: Ensemble non-equivalence (10’)
• Andrea Somazzi (15’)

12:50 Lunch@Canteen

 

Matteo Bruno won the NEDO award!

During the wonderful TOFFEe workshop #1 on the 24th of October, Matteo Bruno graduated as the youngest NEDO award winner at the age of 25 years and 290 days. Here is the photo of the slides containing the NEDO can. Congratulation to our prodigious Nedoer!

The can is quite small, but it’s there. As in the most honorable NEDO tradition, there is no sense for the presence of the NEDO can there.

First Workshop of the Florence Center for Data Science

Hi, Nedoers,

this quick message is for advertising a workshop in Florence launching the Florence Center For Data Science, directed by prof. Mealli. You can find more information here.

Florence is near, even if Trenitalia may have given you a different perspective, thus participate since it is soopercool 🙂 By the way, viale Morgagni is pretty close to the Firenze Rifredi railway station, you can easily reach the conference venue on foot.

Cheers and stay tuNEDO!

I mean, Science is cool, but even Lampredotto is. Do not leave Florence without trying it!

TOFFEe workshop!

Dear Nedoers,

TOFFEe (TOols for Fighting FakEs) is a IMT PAI (Progetto di Attività Integrata, integrated research activity project), leaded by prof. Rocco De Nicola and including prof. Guido Caldarelli, prof. Irene Crimaldi, dr. Fabio Saracco and dr. Marinella Petrocchi (IIT, CNR, Pisa).

The TOFFEe crew is proud to invite the whole IMT community (but, above all, the Nedoers) to its first kick-off workshop, that will take place on Wednesday April 17 at 2 pm in the Cappella Guinigi.

The ambition of TOFFEe is to overcome important limitations of existing social platforms, which often dedicate little attention to trustworthy interaction among peers and to reliability of information. The aim of the project is to increase people’s confidence on the data they get and about who they follow, while minimizing the risk of false information and malicious actions.

TOFFEe will build on expertises in Computer Science for studying the effective paths of data over the net and their sources, Network Science for studying social connections, Sociology and Psychology for studying the dynamics leading to trust fakes, Probability and Statistics for analyzing the widespread of the fakes and their impact. Given the multidisciplinary nature of the proposal, many of the expertises present in the IMT School, well beyond the list of proposers, will be involved.

The (tentative) program has already changed since the official mail:

14:30 Rocco De Nicola, Guido Caldarelli (IMT School): Introduction 

15:10 Andrea Nicolai, Simona De Rosa (T6Ecosystems): SOMA: the European social Media Observatory on disinformation: strategies and plans to tackle fake news 

15:30 Break

15:40 Stefano Cresci (IIT, CNR, Pisa): Spotting content-polluting botnets in Twitter

16:00 Marinella Petrocchi (IIT, CNR): Better Safe Than Sorry: an Adversarial Approach to improve Social Bot Detection

16:20 Toffee Break

16:40 Alessandro Balestrucci (GSSI School of Advanced Studies, L’Aquila): The target audience of misinformation: Credulous human users

17:00 Carolina Becatti (IMT School): Collaboration and followership: a stochastic model for activities in social networks

17:20 Fabio Saracco (IMT School): The backbone of news consumption on social networks and the political debate on Twitter 

17:40 Rocco De Nicola (IMT School): Conclusions and farewell

 

You are welcome to participate, whether you are interested or not.

 

Cheers and stay tuNEDO,

Nedo

The TOFFEe logo is indeed pretty cool.

 

For A Few Conferences More

Nedo meets a colleague in a summer school

Hi, guys,

Nedo is still silent, but not for long. Even if it is going to be more “formal”, next week we are going to have a network workshop, more details are going to appear soon. In the meanwhile, Nedo continues advertising conferences:

 

CRITICAL AND COLLECTIVE EFFECTS IN GRAPHS AND NETWORKS – 2019: Les Houches, May 6-10

CBNA Summer School in Social Network analysis 2019: Greenwich, June 3-14

Complexity72h, Lucca, of course 🙂 17-21 June

Lipari School on Computational Complex and Social Systems 2019:  July 19-25

Advances in Complex Systems: From Ecology to Economics 2019: Lake Como School of Advanced Studies, July 22-26

Mediterranean School of Complex Networks: August 31- September 6

CCS 2019, Singapore: September 30-October 4

Have fun and stay tuNEDO!

Conference advertisement!

Dear Nedoers,

the Nedo fire rests under the ashes, but it will come up again soon. Not as Nedo, but as a huge list of (more formal) seminars by the Networks group. As always, stay tuNEDO!

In the meantime, Nedo advertises the first Regional Conference in Complex Systems in Trento. Here you can find the official website: as you can see there are really nice invited speakers.

Stay tuNEDO for the next events,

cheers!

Kids time: Matteo Bruno!

Kids time again! Matteo Bruno spontaneously decided to present his last paper (at moment available on arxiv here), Colombian export capabilities: building the firms-products network. We are going to meet in classroom 1 on Friday 5th at 12.30.

Cheers

Juan Ignacio Perotti @IMT

It is a great pleasure for the Nedo board to announce the following talk.

Juan Ignacio Perotti, formerly on board on the NETWORKS unit, is presenting the talk “Thermodynamics of the Minimum Description Length on Community Detection“, tomorrow, 2nd of October at 18 in classroom 1.

Abstract: In this talk I will introduce the Boltzmannian MDL (BMDL), a framework we have developed for statistical modeling [1]. Firstly, I will present the concept of universal codes and how they are related to different frameworks for statistical modeling. In particular, I will introduce the Refined MDL (RMDL), which is the “most effective” universal code, and which is the basis from where we develop ours [2]. Secondly, I will introduce the BMDL and how it should be used for model selection. Thirdly, I will reintroduce the BMLD; this time to address the statistical significance of the model selections. Fourthly and finally, I will show and example of its application on the problem of community detection in complex networks [3]. In particular, I will show how we can derive from the BMDL: i) Girvan-Newman modularity [4] and ii) Zhang-Moore method and criteria for community detection [5].

Refs.
[1] Thermodynamics of the Minimum Description Length on Community Detection,
J.I. Perotti, C.J. Tessone, A. Clauset, G. Caldarelli (2018)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.07005
[2] The minimum description length principle,
P.D. Grünwald, MIT press (2007)
[3] Community detection in graphs,
S. Fortunato, Phys. Rep. 486, 75–174 (2010)
[4] Finding and evaluating community structure in networks,
M.E.J. Newman, M. Girvan, Phys Rev E 69, 026113 (2004)
[5] Scalable detection of statistically significant communities and hierarchies, using message passing for modularity,
P. Zhang and C. Moore, PNAS 111 (51) (2014)

BTW, Juan is the cousin of Diego Perotti, player of AS Roma.

Stay tuNED(O) for updates!

2 of 2: the Nedo champion is here to stay

At CCS 2018 in Thessaloniki, the IMT troop observed a rare bold demonstration of power. Already being the champion in charge, after challenging her mentor Tiziano in IMT, during the Complexity72h, Federica demonstrated that the Nedo champion is here to stay. In her first contribution at the conference, she showed a slide with the Nedo can.

Actually, there is no reason for the Nedo can to appear in this slide. That’s the difference between a good player and a prodigy.

Not satisfied for being confirmed as the Nedo champion, she decide to reiterate her position the following day.

If Nedo can had no sense to be there yesterday, today it is ok too!

With the result of this morning, she scored the longest series of confirmations in the history of the Nedo award. Challengers are warned.

«What are 13 Champions Leagues, if you don’t have a Nedo award?»
—Florentino Peréz (president of Real Madrid)

(special thanks to Giacomo for the photos)