Speakers
Chiara Poletto is a researcher at the National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM) in Paris (France), working on the spreading of infectious diseases seen as a complex system phenomenon. Epidemics are mediated by human contacts and, on a different scale, by human mobility patterns. Therefore, the role of network structure on infection risk, its persistence and impact on the population is a central question of her research work. Within this broad context, she is dedicating increasing attention to the physics of interacting spreading processes underlying important problems in disease ecology. Poletto received her PhD in Physics from the University of Padova (Italy) in 2009 and was then Post Doc at the Computational Epidemiology Laboratory, ISI Foundation, Torino (Italy), before joining the INSERM in 2012. She received the Junior Scientific Award of the Complex Systems Society for extraordinary scientific achievements. Her studies on emerging pathogens’ epidemics (from Ebola outbreak to Zika) have translated into expert advices for public health decision makers.
Javier M. Buldú (Electrical Engineer and PhD in Applied Physics) is the Coordinator of the Complex Systems Group at the Rey Juan Carlos University (Madrid, Spain) and the Principal Investigator of the Laboratory of Biological Networks at the Center for Biomedical Technology (Madrid, Spain). He is an expert on Network Science and its application to social, technological and biological systems. During the last decade, he has been focused on the development of new methodologies to understand the organization of functional brain networks. His publications include papers in Nature Physics, Nature Communications, PNAS, Physical Review Letters or Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
Javier M. Buldú (Electrical Engineer and PhD in Applied Physics) is the Coordinator of the Complex Systems Group at the Rey Juan Carlos University (Madrid, Spain) and the Principal Investigator of the Laboratory of Biological Networks at the Center for Biomedical Technology (Madrid, Spain). He is an expert on Network Science and its application to social, technological and biological systems. During the last decade, he has been focused on the development of new methodologies to understand the organization of functional brain networks. His publications include papers in Nature Physics, Nature Communications, PNAS, Physical Review Letters or Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
Ciro Cattuto received a PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Perugia (Italy). After a few experiences in the software industry, he worked at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and then moved to the Frontier Research System of the RIKEN Institute (Japan) as a post-doctoral Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. After three years in Tokyo, he was awarded a grant at the "Centro Studi e Ricerche Enrico Fermi" and he moved to Roma, where he was affiliated to the Physics Department of the Sapienza University of Roma. In 2008 he joined the ISI Foundation, where he currently leads the Data Science Laboratory. From 2010 to 2014 he was Deputy Scientific Director of the ISI Foundation, and since 2014 he serves as the Scientific Director of the Institute.
Emilio Ferrara is Research Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California, Research Leader at the USC Information Sciences Institute, and Co-Director of the Machine Intelligence and Data Science (MINDS) center at USC. His research interests include modeling human behavior and performance in techno-social systems and characterizing information diffusion in online social networks. He was named 2015 IBM Watson Big Data Influencer, he is the recipient of the 2016 Complex System Society Junior Scientific Award, and he received the 2016 DARPA Young Faculty Award. Before joining USC in 2015, he was research faculty in the School of Informatics and Computing of Indiana University (2012-2015). Ferrara has published over 80 articles on social networks, machine learning, and network science. His research is published in venues like the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Communications of the ACM, and Physical Review Letters, and is regularly discussed in the mainstream media. He is Principal Investigator of projects funded by DARPA, IARPA, Air Force, and the Office of Naval Research.
Chiara Poletto is a researcher at the National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM) in Paris (France), working on the spreading of infectious diseases seen as a complex system phenomenon. Epidemics are mediated by human contacts and, on a different scale, by human mobility patterns. Therefore, the role of network structure on infection risk, its persistence and impact on the population is a central question of her research work. Within this broad context, she is dedicating increasing attention to the physics of interacting spreading processes underlying important problems in disease ecology. Poletto received her PhD in Physics from the University of Padova (Italy) in 2009 and was then Post Doc at the Computational Epidemiology Laboratory, ISI Foundation, Torino (Italy), before joining the INSERM in 2012. She received the Junior Scientific Award of the Complex Systems Society for extraordinary scientific achievements. Her studies on emerging pathogens’ epidemics (from Ebola outbreak to Zika) have translated into expert advices for public health decision makers.
Brenda McCowan is Professor of Animal Behavior in the Department of Population Health and Reproduction with the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of California, Davis. She has been conducting quantitative research on complex systems at the human-animal interface for over 20 years, including complexity in nonhuman cognitive and communication systems, anthropogenic disruption of wildlife systems, robustness of animal social networks, and network epidemiology. She received her Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology from Harvard University and her BS in Animal Physiology from Cornell University. She is the current and founding director of International Institute for Human-Animal Networks at UC Davis, which engages a multidisciplinary team of investigators to address the socio-ecological processes underlying various metrics of robustness in human-animal network systems. Brenda’s main research interest is in understanding how patterns of health and well-being within human and animal societies represent emergent global patterns whose underlying dynamics must be understood to better tackle health as a complex system. Her team uses a computational systems science network approach in concert with biobehavioral assessment, genomics, epidemiology, and socio-ecology to understand how spatial and mathematical relations of networks relate to the content and quality of relationships and how this multivariate covariation influences a diversity of health outcomes. Her team conducts captive research on large groups of socially-housed rhesus macaques as well as field research on several macaque species living at coupled human-macaque interfaces. Her work has been supported by the Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
Mason Porter earned a B.S. in applied mathematics from Caltech in 1998 and a Ph.D. from the Center for Applied Mathematics from Cornell University in 2002. He was a postdoc at Georgia Tech (math), Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, and Caltech (physics) before joining the faculty of the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford in 2007. He was named Professor of Nonlinear and Complex Systems in 2014. He moved to UCLA as a Professor of Mathematics in 2016. Porter is known for the diversity and interdisciplinarity of his research (and for his sharp wit). He has made contributions to mesoscale structures in networks, social contagions, granular force networks, social networks, multilayer networks, navigation in transportation systems, granular crystals, Bose-Einstein condensates, numerical evaluation of hypergeometric functions, synchronization of cows, and many other topics. His awards include the Erdős-Rényi Prize in network science (2014), a London Mathematical Society Whitehead Prize (2015), the Young Scientist Award for Socio- and Econophysics from the German Physical Society (2016), and the Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) Faculty Mentoring Award (Advanced Career Category; Mathematics and Computer Science Division) in 2017 in recognition of his mentorship of undergraduate research projects. He is Fellow of both the American Physical Society and the American Mathematical Society. Most importantly, he is a member of the Zacharay Karate Club Club, the most coveted award in network science.
Miriah is an associate professor in the School of Computing at the University of Utah and a faculty member in the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute. Together with Alex Lex she runs the Visualization Design Lab, which focuses on the design of visualization systems for helping researchers make sense of complex data. She obtained her bachelors degree in astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University, and earned a PhD in computer science from the University of Utah. Prior to joining the faculty at Utah Miriah was a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University and a visiting scientist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Miriah is the recipient of a NSF CAREER grant, a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship, and a NSF/CRA Computing Innovation Fellow award. She was named a University of Utah Distinguished Alumni, both a TED Fellow and a PopTech Science Fellow, and included on MIT Technology Review's TR35 list of the top young innovators. She was also awarded an AAAS Mass Media Fellowship that landed her a stint as a science writer for the Chicago Tribune.
Rowland Kao is a mathematical biologist, originally training in Engineering Physics at the University of Toronto and Theoretical and Computational Physics at the University of Guelph. He has worked at AgResearch in New Zealand, the Institute for Animal Health, and the Universities of Oxford and Glasgow in the UK, before taking up his current position as the Sir Timothy O’Shea Professor of Veterinary Epidemiology and Data Science at the University of Edinburgh. He studies infectious disease dynamics, mainly with respect to the role of demography in the spread and persistence of livestock diseases, such as foot-and-mouth disease, bovine tuberculosis, scrapie, BSE and avian influenza in poultry. This work includes the development of theoretical models of disease transmission on social networks and applications to the transmission of livestock diseases using simple differential equation models, analysis of social networks, statistics and simulations. Increasingly, this work involves the integrated analysis of genetic and epidemiological data to determine the characteristics of disease outbreaks, with bovine Tuberculosis being a lead example. He is also interested in the development of parameter estimation techniques that allow us to infer the transmission networks that arise from the network of potentially infectious contacts, and the role of human decision-making (why do farmers move livestock the way they do, and what would happen if the conditions under which they moved livestock, changed), explored via game-like behaviour in a network context.
Claudia Wagner is an assistant professor in Computer Science at University Koblenz-Landau and currently the scientific director of the Computational Social Science department at GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences. Prior to that she was awarded with a DOC-fFORTE fellowship from the Austrian Academy of Science for her PhD which she received from Graz University of Technology. She worked as research assistant at JOANNEUM RESEARCH in Graz and conducted several international research internships, amongst others at HP labs, Xerox PARC and the Open University. Her research focuses on computational methods for analyzing socio-technical systems and modelling social phenomena, such as inequalities, discrimination, cultural differences and collective attention, in these systems.
Filippo Menczer is a professor of informatics and computer science at Indiana University, Bloomington, with courtesy appointments in cognitive science and physics. He holds a Laurea in Physics from the Sapienza University of Rome and a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Menczer is an ACM Distinguished Scientist and a Senior Research Fellow of The Kinsey Institute. He previously served as division chair in the IUB School of Informatics and Computing, director of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, visiting scientist at Yahoo Research, Fellow of the Institute for Scientific Interchange Foundation in Torino, Italy, Fellow-at-large of the Santa Fe Institute, and on the Senior Leadership Team of the IU Network Science Institute. He has been the recipient of Fulbright, Rotary Foundation, and NATO fellowships, and a Career Award from the National Science Foundation. His research, supported by the NSF, DoD, McDonnell Foundation, and Democracy Fund, focuses on Web and data science, social network analysis, social computation, Web mining, and modeling of complex information networks. His work on the spread of information and misinformation in social media has been covered in many US and international news sources, including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, NPR, PBS, CNN, BBC, Economist, Guardian, Atlantic, Reuters, Science, and Nature. Menczer received multiple service awards and currently serves as associate editor of the Network Science journal and on the editorial boards of EPJ Data Science and PeerJ Computer Science.
Samuel V. Scarpino is a complex systems scientist investigating questions at the intersection of network science, human behavior, and disease. His work spans a broad range of topics, including: infectious disease modeling, forecasting in complex systems, genetic topology of disease, and decision making under uncertainty. Sam's publications on Ebola, whooping cough, and influenza have been covered by the New York Times, NPR, the Economist, Smithsonian Magazine, and numerous other venues. Sam is an Assistant Professor of Marine & Environmental Sciences and Physics and is a core faculty member in the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University. He earned a Ph.D. in integrative biology from The University of Texas at Austin in 2013 was a Santa Fe Institute Omidyar Postdoctoral Fellow from 2013 - 2016.
Sonia Kéfi is an ecologist at the CNRS, at the Institut des Sciences de l’Evolution de Montpellier (ISEM), France. In the current context of global changes, it is becoming increasingly important for us to better understand the drivers of ecosystems’ responses to perturbations. She investigates, both empirically and theoretically, how species interactions affect the functioning and stability of ecosystems. Her research aims at identifying ecological mechanisms that confer resilience to ecosystems, i.e. the ability to recover after a perturbation. She received the van Marum prize for environmental sciences in 2011 and the Bronze medal of the CNRS in 2017.
Brooke Foucault Welles is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies and a member of the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University in Boston, MA, USA. Combining network science methods with social science theories, Dr. Foucault Welles studies how online communication networks enable and constrain behavior, with particular emphasis on how these networks facilitate the pursuit of individual, team, and collective goals. Much of her work is interdisciplinary and collaborative, with co-authors from computer science, political science, digital humanities, design, and public health. Her recent contributions include a series of studies of the transformative power of networked counterpublics, techniques for the longitudinal analysis of communication networks, and guidelines for the effective use of network visualizations in scientific and lay publications.
Amy Wesolowski is an infectious disease epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her research focuses on utilizing novel forms of human mobility data to understand the spatial spread of infectious diseases. She works on both vector-borne and directly transmitted diseases including malaria, dengue, measles, and rubella to investigate how these pathogens can emerge in naive populations and the impact of human travel on public health control efforts.
Stefano Battiston is SNF Professor at the Department of Banking and Finance of the University of Zurich. His work applies the complex networks approach both to the empirical analysis of large economic networks and the modeling of their dynamics. Since several years, his main interests have been financial contagion, default cascades, and propagation of financial distress, where he combines the insights from the statistical mechanics of networks with the analysis of economic incentives. He has been involved in many international projects, including FOC (Forecasting Financial Crises) the first European project aimed at anticipating structural instabilities in the global financial networks. He is now the coordinator of the FET project SIMPOL that investigates policy modeling in finance and climate finance. From 2015 he also coordinates the FET project DOLFINS that investigates how to better channel finance towards a sustainable economy in a networked economy. Within the Financial Stability Program directed by the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and funded by the Institute of New Economic Thinking, Stefano Battiston coordinates the Working Group on Financial Networks.
Sophie Achard is a statistician by education who has acquired an extensive experience of working with neuroscientists. She received a Ph.D. degree in statistics on dependence measures with applications to Independent Component Analysis from the now Université Grenoble Alpes. As a post-doctoral scholar, she joined the Brain Mapping Unit (University of Cambridge) where she has introduced a multiscale evaluation of the connectivity between brain regions. She is currently with the Grenoble Images Parole Signal Automatique lab as a CNRS senior researcher, where she is the principal investigator of a multidisciplinary project between statistics, neuroscience, and signal.
Associate Professor at Politecnico di Milano, Head of the BSc and MSc in Communication Design, Paolo is member of the Design PhD board at Politecnico and co-editor of the journal “Big Data and Society” (SAGE publications). Founder and scientific director of DensityDesign Research Lab, he is member of the Steering Committee of the »Reassembling the Republic of Letters« COST Action (www.republicofletters.net) where he leads the Working Group on Communication and Data Visualization.
He participated to several applied research projects funded by private and public organizations where Communication Design and Data Visualization competences have been used across multiple disciplinary domains to face a vast range of complex issues: from bringing data in the hands of non-expert users – the public - to mapping the evolution of techno-scientific controversies on the web and supporting the peculiar inquiry process of Digital Humanities scholars.
The activity of the DensityDesign research lab focuses on the visual representation of complex phenomena and the development of interfaces and tools as RAW (http://raw.densitydesign.org/) for enhancing the culture and the practice of Data and Information Visualization.