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!

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Nedo is thirsty for young blood: Matteo Serafino!

Hi, guys,

Nedo is thirsty for young blood. Matteo Serafino is going to present his seminar titled “Do complex networks self organize to satisfy finite size scaling?” in classroom 2 next Monday 6th at 14. Here is the abstract:

Network representations play a vital role in the development of predictive models of physical, biological, and social collective phenomena. A quite remarkable feature of many of these networks is that they are believed to be approximately scale free:

the fraction of nodes with $k$ incident links (the degree) follows a power law $p(k)\propto k^{-\lambda}$ for sufficiently large degree $k$ .

The value of the exponent $\lambda$ as well as deviations from power law scaling provide invaluable information

on the mechanisms underlying the formation of the network such as small degree saturation, variations in the local fitness to compete for links and high degree cutoffs owing to the finite size of the network. Indeed real networks are not infinitely large

and the largest degree of any network cannot be larger than the number of nodes. Finite size scaling is a useful tool for analyzing deviations from power law behavior in the vicinity of a critical point in a physical system arising due to a finite correlation length.

Here we show that despite the essential differences between networks and critical phenomena, finite size scaling provides a powerful framework for analyzing self- similarity and the scale free nature of empirical networks. We analyze about 200 naturally occurring networks with distinct dynamical origins, and find that a large number of these follow the finite size scaling hypothesis without any self-tuning. Notably this is the case of biological protein interaction networks, technological computer and hyperlink networks and informational citation and lexical networks. Marked deviations appear in other examples, especially infrastructure and transportation networks, but also social, affiliation and annotation networks.

Importantly, the values of the scaling exponents for each network apparently follow a universal exponential relation.

Beers or tonic liqueurs? Please, answer in the comments!

Stay tuNEDO!

“Flower Power!”

 

 

Just a reminder: Miguel Ibáñez Berganza @IMT

Hi, Nedoers,

this is a quick reminder of the seminar of Miguel Ibáñez Berganza (La Sapienza University, Rome) of tomorrow in classroom 2 at 15. The title of the seminar is pretty cool: Facial beauty and statistical inference. Here is the abstract:

Facial attractiveness is a paradigm of a complex phenomenon depending on many variables through complex criteria, difficult to infer. We present a novel experimental method allowing for a probabilistic description of the single subject preferred modifications of a reference facial image. Our method allows to unveil the essential subjective character of facial attractiveness. Furthermore, we will compare various methods of unsupervised inference (mainly Maximum Entropy and Restricted Boltzmann Machines) of the database of facial modifications according to various subjects, described in terms of Cartesian landmark coordinates of the facial images.

Stay tuNEDO,

Nedo

Miguel gave the name to the famous electric guitar brand Ibanez.

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.

 

Mirko Hu!

Hi, Nedoers,

it has been a long week indeed! First we started with the thesis defences of Giacomo, Jeroen and Federica congrats! Moreover, a special mention to Jerry and Fede for the presence of the Nedo Can in their presentation. Nedo invites you to send us the pdf in order to be mentioned on the official website.

The day after, we continued with the great workshop organised by Tiziano (good job indeed!). Another special mention to Jerry for being present, awake and, at least apparently, sober after the Ph.D. party.

Finally arriving to the point, on the 29th of March (the date changed, see the calendar!), we have a new Nedo event: Mirko Hu is going to give the seminar Modeling and control of the gut microbiota: a multi-layer network approach. Here is the abstract:

The gut microbiota has a fundamental role in human health. The commensal microbes that live inside the human body are important both for the healthy functioning of the host and to avoid specific diseases and disorders, such as Chron’s disease, obesity, or autism. Thanks to the high-throughput techniques (omics), we have now a huge quantity of data associated to genes and their products and they, in turn, can be transformed into useful information for a more holistic approach in healthcare (systems medicine). Associating microbes, genes and genes’ products to diseases and disorders using multilayer networks, we could tackle the problems of drugs formulation or maintenance of homeostasis as a control problem applied to biological multilayer networks. In this review, we will provide examples of works where networks were applied to systems medicine or systems biology and we will present the state-of-art of the control theory applied to networks.

Stay tuNEDO!

p.s. I am not sure it will work (in case it won’t, write me/knock at Fabio’s door), here you have the link to Nedo calendar, with the Nedo seminars and the deadlines of the conferences cited in the previous post.

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)

A great day for Nedo Award

It is a big pleasure for Nedo to announce a great activity on Nedo award: during the Complexity 72h, held in IMT two great events happens. First, Tiziano, as part of the organisation,  presented himself with this slide which is a sort of meta-Nedo: a shot of himself presenting a slide with the Nedo can (this one).

You probably cannot see it: Tiziano presenting a slide with Tiziano presenting a slide with Nedo.

Then, the disciple overcame the teacher: few minutes later Federica Parisi (the actual owner of the award) presented the following slide:

It’s small, but it’s there!

So, congratulations to the new holder of the Nedo Award!

Kids’ time: baptism by fire of the newcomers, AGAIN!

Dear Nedoers,

Nedo strikes back!

After several reorganizations, we will finally have the baptism by fire of the newcomers: Matteo Bruno, Mirko Hu, Emiliano Marchese, Matteo Serafino will have a Nedo on 5th December at 17.30 (we had to postpone it!), a quarter of hour each. The seminars will take place in the Classroom 1.

For the speakers: check the rules of Nedo seminars and remember, NO SLIDES!

Stay tuNED(o)!