Graph and Network Seminar Series Featuring Professor Santo Fortunato

Networks, communities, and the science of science

Santo Fortunato, a professor at the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University Bloomington, will give the first talk in this year's Graph and Network Research Interest Group seminar series. 

This event will be held in Room 206 of the Data Science Building (1919 Ivy Road). Participants may also watch via zoom.

Abstract: Detecting network communities, i.e. subgraphs whose nodes have an appreciably larger probability to get connected to each other than to other nodes of the network, is a fundamental problem in network science. Here I will discuss three major issues. First, I will address the limits of the most popular class of clustering algorithms, those based on the optimization of a global quality function, like modularity maximization. Second, I will critically review the process of validation, probably the single most important issue of network community detection, as it implicitly involves the concept of community, which is ill-defined. I will discuss the importance of using realistic benchmark graphs with built-in community structure as well as the role of metadata. Finally, I will show that neural embeddings can be used to efficiently detect communities. Science of science is the investigation of science as a system, via analysis and modeling of data on scientists and their interactions. I will show that the distributions of citations of papers published in the same discipline and year rescale to a universal curve, by properly normalizing the raw number of cites. Also, I will discuss the impact of the COVID pandemic on science.

Short Bio: Santo Fortunato is a Professor at Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering of Indiana University. Previously he was professor of complex systems at the Department of Computer Science of Aalto University, Finland. Prof. Fortunato got his PhD in Theoretical Particle Physics at the University of Bielefeld In Germany. His focus areas are network science, especially community detection in graphs, computational social science and science of science. His research has been published in leading journals, including Nature, Science, Nature Physics, PNAS, Physical Review Letters, Physical Review X, Reviews of Modern Physics, Physics Reports and has collected over 47,000 citations (Google Scholar). His single-author article Community detection in graphs (Physics Reports 486, 75-174, 2010) is one of the best known and most cited papers in network science. Fortunato received the Young Scientist Award for Socio- and Econophysics 2011, a prize given by the German Physical Society, for his outstanding contributions to the physics of social systems. 

Read ahead: Fortunato, S. et al. Science of science. Science 359 (2018).