Alex Gates

Postdoc openings at Kellogg/Northwestern!

Review begins Feb 15 (rolling until filled).

Apply / details: www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/academics-re...

Research Associate in Psychology in Charlottesville, Virginia, United States of America | Research at University of Virginia Apply for Research Associate in Psychology job with University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia, United States of America. Research at University of Virginia

Hello all! I’m recruiting a postdoc to work with my lab and I on methods for analyzing intensive longitudinal timeseries of psychological phenomena, with particular focus on measurement and optimization of interventions! Start would be August 2026

Open call for the rOpenSci Champions Program 2026! You can now apply to participate in the 2026 Champions Program. We are looking for people to participate in mentoring roles and to become Champions.

🚀 We're pleased to open the call for Champions and Mentors for the rOpenSci Champions Program 2026-2027, a 12-month journey in open science, research software, and community building.

🌎 This year's cohort will be run in Spanish and focused on Latin America

More info at ropensci.org/blog/2026/01...

Sorry we didn’t get to talk much from the other side of the table. But happy to welcome you to cville!

Another joint keynote at NetSci 2026 is official! 𝗔𝗹𝗯𝗲𝗿𝘁-𝗟𝗮́𝘀𝘇𝗹𝗼́ 𝗕𝗮𝗿𝗮𝗯𝗮́𝘀𝗶 and 𝗥𝗲́𝗸𝗮 𝗔𝗹𝗯𝗲𝗿𝘁 reunite on stage for a one-of-a-kind talk. Their discovery of scale-free networks and the Barabási–Albert model reshaped network science. We can’t wait to welcome you!
@barabasi.bsky.social
tinyurl.com/4t5p46yr

Business Development Contractor — Data Science Education (UVA NOVA) — School of Data Science UVA School of Data Science seeks a NOVA-based business development leader to grow executive and non-degree programs in AI, health, and cybersecurity.

We're hiring a Business Development Contractor to expand SDS’s executive and non-degree education footprint in Northern Virginia. Cool job. Great organization (biased as I am). Unlimited bonus comp 🤑 datascience.virginia.edu/pages/busine...

Weathering budget cuts: Lessons from NASA The current uncertainty and cuts to science funding affect universities, research facilities, and laboratories across the United States, but this situation is not unprecedented. Under pressure to fund...

My first editorial in @science.org was published today: what to do (and, importantly, what NOT to do) when your grants are suddenly cut or research funding is uncertain. Please read and share!

#AcademicSky #Science #Astronomy

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

A lot of findings in this new paper, but one is the inevitable doom of traditional peer review:
1) AI creates a flood of papers, both good & bad
2) Paper complexity, a key screen and signal of quality for human work, is actually a signal of low quality for AI
There's no plan for what comes next.

Thrilled to announce the Handbook of Computational Social Science is officially out! 956 pages, 118 authors, and truly global, interdisciplinary perspectives. Deep thanks to the contributors and anonymous reviewers who shaped this over 4 years. Buy your copy now!
@elgarpublishing.bsky.social

A wonderful opportunity to come join the @uvadatascience.bsky.social community!!

Representation in science and trust in scientists in the USA - Nature Human Behaviour Druckman et al. document gaps in trust in scientists in the USA. People from groups less represented among scientists (for example, women and those with lower economic status) are less trusting. Incre...

Paper out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com:

1) those groups (women, African Americans, lower SES, rural) that are underrepresented in science have been less trusting of science.

2) If you improve representation in science, you improve trust among those groups.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We are looking for a PhD student to work with us on network science methods for biomedicine. The student can be enrolled in any graduate program. #NetworkMedicine #ComplexSystems.

Research Intern - Computational Social Science | Microsoft Careers Research Interns put inquiry and theory into practice. Alongside fellow doctoral candidates and some of the world's best researchers, Research Interns learn, collaborate, and network for life. Researc...

Want to be an intern at Microsoft Research in the Computational Social Science group in NYC (Jake Hofman, David Rothschild, Dan Goldstein)

Follow this link and do your thing! Deadline approaching soonish!

apply.careers.microsoft.com/careers/job/...

Assistant Professor (f/m/d) Assistant Professor (f/m/d)

We are hiring!
The Department of Network and Data Science of Central European University (Vienna) has an open position for an Assistant Professor in network science and computational social science.

Thinking just about editors and desk rejection, is it better to submit a paper before the winter holidays or wait until the new year?

Has anyone analyzed seasonal/time-of-day rejection rates?

The orbital argumentation of AI writing Introduction

Blog post: "The orbital argumentation of AI writing"

Have you ever wondered why AI writing seems to orbit around the point but not make the point? I wrote it about. I hope you'll read! And enjoy!

meresophistry.substack.com/p/seeking-hu...

IC2S2 2026 registration is open!
Explore the 2026 conference here ➡️ ic2s2-2026.org

✔️ Submissions open December 15th
✔️ Keynotes will be announced between now and February
✔️ Full program of selected talks and tutorials will be available in late April

Networks are #complex and their dynamics often look chaotic. But we can reconstruct latent spaces where their behavior becomes strikingly regular, revealing functional organization across biology, society and technology.

How? 👉 rdcu.be/eSsqn 🧪🧠🦠🧬🌐

Kudos to Andrea, @dzanc.bsky.social & Sebastiano!

Doctoral Researcher, Philosophy of science: AI in scientific problem solving Doctoral Researcher, Philosophy of science: AI in scientific problem solving

A funded PhD position in philosophy of science: AI in scientific problem solving. At @helsinki.fi @tint-philosophy.bsky.social #philsci jobs.helsinki.fi/job/Helsinki...

✨ Excited to announce 𝗬𝗼𝗻𝗴-𝗬𝗲𝗼𝗹 (𝗬𝗬) 𝗔𝗵𝗻 as a NetSci 2026 Plenary Speaker! A leading network and data scientist, YY explores how complex systems shape behavior, cognition, and discovery. Stay tuned for more speaker updates as we build toward an inspiring NetSci 2026! ✨
www.netsci2026.com/speakers

At OASIS Lab, #UCLA, we are accepting applications for a PhD student who is passionate about using computational modeling, big data, and HCI to advance digital safety, responsible AI, and the study of online information ecosystems.

tinyurl.com/phdopenningu...

#PhD #AIforGood #OnlineSafety

One week left to apply to the UVA Biology PhD program! If you or someone you know are interested in contagion from a complex systems perspective, please reach out! I'm looking for a grad student! bio.as.virginia.edu/how-apply-gr...

Unifying Information-Theoretic and Pair-Counting Clustering Similarity Comparing clusterings is central to evaluating unsupervised models, yet the many existing similarity measures can produce widely divergent, sometimes contradictory, evaluations. Clustering similarity ...

9/
To wrap up: this framework doesn’t solve every debate about clustering similarity…
…but it does finally give us a shared language for understanding why different measures disagree, and how they fit together.
If you’re curious, the preprint is here👇
arxiv.org/abs/2511.03000

Thanks for reading! 🧵✨

8/
I'm also able to show that information-theoretic measures can be approximated using higher-order tuple counting (triplets, quads, …) built on top of pair counting.

7/
So…I’m excited to share my paper introducing a unified framework for clustering similarity:

It introduces a unified framework where pair-counting and information-theoretic measures both are expressed as algebraic expansions around “independence” and pin-points which terms differ

6/
As a community, we have plenty of examples of when the measures differ, but we’ve lacked a principled framework explaining why these measures disagree, how they relate, and whether they’re reconcilable.

And honestly?
It always bothered me.

5/
If you’ve ever used examples from both families, there’s a good chance:

The pair-counting score says these clusterings are nearly identical!
The information-theoretic score says they share almost no structure!

…and you’re left thinking:
“How can both be ‘right’?”

4/
Pair-counting measures think in terms of pairs of items:
“How many pairs of nodes did both communities put together?… or apart?”

Information-theoretic measures ask instead:
“How much uncertainty remains in one clustering given the other?”

3/
Broadly, the community has coalesced around two major families of clustering similarity measures:

Pair-counting measures
(e.g., Rand, Adjusted Rand, Jaccard)

…and

Information-theoretic measures
(e.g., Mutual Information, NMI, Variation of Information)

2/
Clustering is everywhere in science: communities in social networks, customer segments in marketing, functional groups in biology

And yet, there’s no universal “right” answer for how similar they are.

Turns out: measuring similarity between clusterings is surprisingly deep, subtle, and messy.