OnliNedo Seminar: Martin Rosvall!

Dear Nedoers,

I hope to find you well and safe!

The OnliNedo season 2020/2021 is going to finish with the last seminar: Martin Rosvall from Umeå University is going to give the seminar entitled Mapping flows on weighted and directed networks with incomplete observations. The talk is going to be held on Google Meet at the link https://meet.google.com/hys-dmpy-axh on Wednesday 12th of May at 14:30.

Abstract: Detecting significant community structure in networks with incomplete observations is challenging because the evidence for specific solutions fades away with missing data. For example, recent research shows that flow-based community detection methods can highlight spurious communities in sparse undirected and unweighted networks with missing links.

Missing link observations in weighted and directed networks aggravate this overfitting problem since each link carries more information.

To address this problem, here we extend the idea behind the Bayesian estimate of the map equation for unweighted and undirected networks to enable more robust community detection in weighted and directed networks. We derive a weighted and directed prior network that can incorporate metadata information and show that an efficient implementation in the community-detection method Infomap provides more reliable communities even with a significant fraction of the data missing.

Be there and stay tuNedo and safe!

Nedo

OnliNedo Seminars: Miguel A. Muñoz!

Dear Nedoers,

I hope to find you well and safe! This special April continues with prof. Miguel A. Muñoz, University of Grenada!

PAY ATTENTION!
The date and time changed: the seminar will be held next Thursday 15th April at 12.00. The link to Google Meet is: https://meet.google.com/cws-ctgm-oac

The title of the seminar is Rapid evolution of diversified survival strategies in bacterial communities.

Abstract: Ecological and evolutionary dynamics have been historically regarded as unfolding at broadly separated timescales.  However, these two types of processes are nowadays well-documented to intermingle much more tightly than traditionally assumed, especially in communities of microorganisms. Improving the existing approches to these problems and developing novel analytical and computational frameworks is a challenge of utmost theoretical and practical relevance.

Within this context, in this talk I present an introduction to some relevant concepts such as “bet-hedging”, optimal strategies, evolutionary tradoffs, diversification, etc. Then, I discuss recent experimental results showing empirical evidence of very rapid evolution of tolerance by lag in bacterial communities that are periodically exposed to antibiotic stress in laboratory conditions.  In particular, the communities evolve to develop a broad distribution of lag times —i.e. the times that individual bacteria typically remain in a dormant state to cope with stress— whose statistics are determined by those of the environments, thus creating a sort of collective memory in the community. Finally, I will discuss a general analytical and computational framework that we have developed to model and shed light onto this specific example as well as on more general eco-evolutionary problems and discuss further directions and open problems.

Stay safe and tuNedo,

cheers,

Nedo

Nedo Award: Online Champion!

Dear Nedoers,

we all saw multiple effects of the pandemic on our daily life. For researchers, it means that every workshop, conference or seminar cannot be held in person. So, we expected that the Nedo Award would freeze for a while.
We could not be more wrong: at the end of his presentation at the APS March Meeting, Tommaso Gili ended his presentation with the following slide:

Congratulations to Tommaso, the new winner of the Nedo Award!

Stay tuNedo and safe,

Nedo

Nedo is back! Pablo Villegas online!

Dear Nedoers,

as announced, Nedo is back in a new fashion, adapted to the current countermeasures against the COVID-19 epidemic. So, Pablo Villegas, new member of the NETWORKS Unit, is going to present himself in an online seminar.
The title of Pablo’s seminar is Phases and phase transitions in the brain:

Abstract: The criticality hypothesis proposes that –under some circumstances– living systems can lie in the vicinity of a phase transition, i.e. at the borderline between their ordered and disordered phases, shedding much light on the comprehension of several natural phenomena that, until recently, were poorly understood. This celebrated and provocative idea conjectures that operating close to a critical point may confer a large number of benefits such as maximal dynamical range, maximal sensitivity to environmental changes, as well as an excellent trade-off between stability and flexibility.

We will discuss and analyze the possible collective phases and phase transitions in which brain can operate from a theoretical point of view (with an special emphasis on recent empirical findings), as well as the effects of the underlying network structure in the emergence of new extended dynamical phases.

The seminar is going to take place on 27th of October at 12:00 online on Google Meet at https://meet.google.com/hry-eotg-gax.

Stay tuNEDO,

Nedo

Just in case you wonder, this is not our Pablo Villegas: ours can play guitar way better.

The best special mention EVER!

A special souvenir from NetSciX in Tokyo, Japan, by Matteo Serafino!

Stay tuNEDO!

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

---

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.