Alec Kirkley

I believe science is much more like art than many scientists are willing to consider. I have a feeling that it would free us to do better science if we embraced this view. I may be mistaken but that's where I am mentally.

Message passing for epidemiological interventions on networks with loops
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21596

The Probabilistic Systems, Information, and Inference group at the University of Cambridge is seeking applicants for funded PhD positions.

Anyone who wants to study networks/complex systems/statistical physics/inference can email me at gtc31@cam.ac.uk

Phys. Rev. X: Fast Nonparametric Inference of Network Backbones for Weighted Graph Sparsification
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/4pg6-mtmt

Excited to see this out! If you need to identify a network backbone but don’t know how to choose the number of edges to keep, here’s a Bayesian solution.

A meme of different kinds of generic network science papers

types of network science papers

25 new scholarships for US researchers Fonds Zukunft Österreich (FZÖ) is providing €10 million in funding for an academy program to bring postdocs from the USA to Austria ++ Faßmann: “The right signal in these turbulent times”

Are you a #postdoc in the US looking to next steps?

The Austrian Academy of Sciences is opening up 25 fellowships: www.oeaw.ac.at/en/news/25-n...

A great reason to use our visitor program at #Complexity #Science Hub @csh.ac.at and see how you would fit in: csh.ac.at/engage/resea... 🧪🦋

25 new scholarships for US researchers Fonds Zukunft Österreich (FZÖ) is providing €10 million in funding for an academy program to bring postdocs from the USA to Austria ++ Faßmann: “The right signal in these turbulent times”

Are you from the US and would like to work as a postdoc in Austria, maybe in our lab? 25 new fellowships will be available in July from the @oeaw.bsky.social: www.oeaw.ac.at/en/news/25-n...

If you are interested; get in touch!

Nowadays, saying your lab is not doing AI (for something, or applied to something) is a revolutionary act.

#ComplexSystems

Next up!

Starting the SINM satellite at @netsciconf.bsky.social with an exciting talk by Daichi Kuroda!

And the code is live here: github.com/DynamicaLab/...

With @allard.bsky.social and the never-online Simon Lizotte (but you can find him at siliz4.github.io)

The Network Science Society has a new class of Fellows! Congratulations to the 2025 awardees:

Francesco Bullo
Guanrong Chen
Hawoong Jeong
János Kertész
Renaud Lambiotte
Philippa E. Pattison
Mason A. Porter
Eckehard Schöll
Sara A. Solla

The 2025 Euler Award in Network Science goes to Ginestra Bianconi! @gin-bianconi.bsky.social 👏

The Erdős-Rényi Prize in Network Science is awarded to Federico Battiston! ⭐

a thing I’ve noticed in my time in research: many people really want to believe that Data™ is some sort of magical object that contains objective truth

but the thing is, just like everything else, data is _produced_ via processes and mechanisms that profoundly affect the shape of the data

Probabilistic alignment of multiple networks - Nature Communications Network alignment is a fundamental problem in several domains that aims at mapping nodes across networks. Here, the authors develop a probabilistic approach that assumes that observed networks are err...

Probabilistic alignment of multiple networks www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Sketch showing the street network simplification process.

Finally, the preprint+Python package "neatnet" is out: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.16198
https://github.com/uscuni/neatnet

If you are working with street/planar/spatial networks, this will solve *so* many problems! Many of my projects had this bottleneck - […]

[Original post on datasci.social]

Journal of Physics: Complexity is an emerging interdisciplinary journal focusing on all areas of complex systems and networks, run by the excellent @gin-bianconi.bsky.social and an editorial board of top researchers across different subfields.

I've been guest editing a focus issue for Journal of Physics: Complexity with @jgyou.bsky.social, @gcant.bsky.social, and Cate De Bacco on Statistical Inference and Machine Learning for Complex Networks. See iopscience.iop.org/collections/..., and feel free to get in touch with any questions!

Finished reviewing my pile of papers for a premier data mining CS conference today and then read their other reviews. Wow. They are utter garbage: largely superficial, thoughtless, and vague. We should be ashamed to call this #peerreview and inflict this misery on each other and on our trainees 1/2

YouTube video by Central European University Professor Federico Battiston Receives the 2025 Young Scientist Award in Socio- and Econophysics

🎉 Congrats to Federico Battiston!
Federico, Associate Professor at CEU DNDS & Director of the PhD Program, has won the 2025 Young Scientist Award in Socio- & Econophysics from the German Physical Society! 🏆

Watch the video: youtu.be/cfv0z7m7mus?...

Network Reconstruction via the Minimum Description Length Principle A new information-theoretic approach to analyzing complex systems uncovers hidden networks by minimizing data complexity, a method that improves accuracy and efficiency.

Happy that this just came out on PRX:

“Network Reconstruction via the Minimum Description Length Principle”

journals.aps.org/prx/abstract... 1/3

Every one of Tiago’s papers is a masterpiece. Give it a read if you work with networks constructed from different types of observations!

Complexity & Networks CORE A hub for the Complexity and Network Science community to gather and share resources.

We are glad to present 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞𝐱𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐍𝐞𝐭𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤𝐬 𝐂𝐎𝐦𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐑𝐄𝐬𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐜𝐞𝐬 (𝐂𝐎𝐑𝐄) 🎉

complexity-core.github.io

𝐂𝐎𝐑𝐄 is a newly-created umbrella organization that aims to gather resources and initiatives directed to the Complexity and Network Science community.

Last day!

Deadline for the SINM workshop at NetSci 2025 is approaching. Only 2 more days to submit! Please feel free to reach out with any questions and see sinm.network for details.

Very important step in the right direction! PCI Network Science is an initiative aligned with these goals networksci.peercommunityin.org/about/about . Consider for your next submission!

The Complex Systems Society Manifesto About the Publishing and Evaluation Systems
cssociety.org/about

Missed the NetSci deadline? No problem! Submit your work to the SINM Satellite at NetSci 2025! We have an amazing lineup of speakers so far, including Michael Schaub, Vince Lyzinski, and @gcant.bsky.social. Revised deadline is Feb 20. See sinm.network for details.