Program, Abstracts, and Slides
PROGRAM
START: 8.45 AM, June 12 2018.
ABSTRACTS
NetSciDraw
Matthew Dabrowski, Bradley Dreher, Chukwudi Kanu, Jake Lewis, Eli Shirk, and Hiroki Sayama
One of the critical problems facing many K-12 education communities is that children are
not educated to think nonlinearly taking interrelationships and interdependencies into
consideration. To address this issue, we have been developing "NetSciDraw", a simple
interactive web-based application that allows users to draw and express their ideas using
nodes and edges, helping them to think in more creative nonlinear ways rather than in
linear paths. The primary grades of focus are ranged from K to 12 so that the children
can begin to think about solving problems with networks early on in their academic
careers. NetSciDraw has been presented and demonstrated at several different venues,
receiving a lot of positive feedback as well as requests for specific features. The
current stable version is v. 3.1, which is available from the following URL:
http://coco.binghamton.edu/netscidraw/index.html
Applying non-technical Network Literacy in Higher Professional education – lessons learned in the Netherlands
Paul van der Cingel, Business and Economics Department, Windesheim University, THE NETHERLANDS
In the context of higher professional education in the Netherlands, this talk will address three questions: 1. If networks are “truly ubiquitous”, why are they so rare in educational curricula? 2. Should this be cause for concern? 3. How can non-technical Network Literacy help students tackle complex problems? To answer these questions, Paul van der Cingel will share lessons learned at Windesheim University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands. Experimental workshops were held at various departments, ranging from Applied Gerontology to Business & Information Management. In these workshops, network visualization proved to be instrumental in teaching students basic Network Literacy concepts and to let them apply the concepts to real-world complex problems.
Building interactive Web contents for the Project, "Network Science in Your Pocket"
Toshihiro Tanizawa, National Institute of Technology, Kochi College, JAPAN
"Network Science in Your Pocket" is a project that enables teachers to give a series of
lectures on various topics of network science at any place even outside campus with tiny
one-board computing devices. Though to construct an actual system on such a device is
surely an indispensable step for the project, to provide a rich amount of contents for
various educational purposes is also important. In this talk, I will show concrete
examples for building interactive Web contents for the Pocket Project using a
combination of existing programming frameworks built with python and javascript.
Concept Networks in Science Education: Their uses in Teaching and Research
Ismo Koponen, Department of Physics, University of Helsinki, FINLAND
Concept maps, which are network-like visualisations of the inter-linkages between concepts, are used in teaching and learning as representations of students' understanding of conceptual knowledge. Here we propose a method based on network analysis to examine such concept maps and to find key concepts within the maps. Towards this end, concept maps are analysed as directed and weighted networks, where nodes are concepts and links represent diverse types of connections between concepts, and where each link is assumed to provide epistemic support to the node it is connected to. The notion of key concept can then be operationalised through the directed flow of information from one node to another in terms of communicability between the nodes. We show that communicability is a simple and reliable way to identify the key concepts and examine their epistemic justification within the network. The communicabilities of the key nodes in the collated network are compared with communicabilities averaged over the set of 12 individual concept maps. The comparison shows the collated network contains more extensive collection of key concepts with better epistemic support than the ensemble of individual networks. The consequences of this notion for the practical role of peer-to-peer learning are discussed.
SciEd project: Multilayer network between science and education
Lyubov Tupikina, Laboratoire de Physique de la Matiere, Ecole Polytechnique, FRANCE
In my talk I will present our new project, SciEd network, created in 2017. This
scientific-educational project was initiated by network scientists and it aims at
building multilayer networks between networks of schools and scientists. Our scheme is
simple: a scientist travels to some city for conference or personal visit and SciEd
organises a lecture for him in that city. Our goal is to manage and maintain stable
interactions in the SciEd network. One of the scientific goals is to gather and analyze
the data of travelling scientists and how one can provide new additional tools for
education in different countries. SciEd network already includes France, Germany, Russia,
Uruguay, the Netherlands, Nepal and India and it managed at the open platform at
https://networkscied.wordpress.com. In the closest future we plan to collect, analyze
and share data for travelling scientists in order to use the information to enrich
school education and create new projects between schools and scientists.
Can we teach network theory through a board game?
Giacomo Scettri, IFISC, Universitat de les Illes Balears, SPAIN
To explore this opportunity, we designed a board game where the basic concepts of network
theory, from nodes and links to degree distribution and centrality measures are
implemented. These abstract ideas are here rendered more accessible through a physical
medium. In particular, players will have to design commercial routes in the
Mediterranean Sea, spreading their economy across all the nodes of a trading network,
which will be created as the interaction among the sea lanes of all the players develops.
Motivated by the need of finding optimal strategies for growing their business, players
will meet the abstract concepts of network theory with an inductive approach,
complementary and more accessible then the formal one. In this talk we will illustrate
the main rules and concepts implemented in the game and show the first results obtained
in high and elementary schools.
Complex Forma Mentis: Building scientific links for understanding a complex world
Massimo Stella, Institute for Complex Systems Simulation, University of Southampton, UK
Complex Forma Mentis is a hybrid research/outreach programme aimed at quantifying and
understanding the perception that high school students have towards STEM subjects. The
research component of the project is based on cognitive network science and it involves
lab experiments and surveys for building forma mentis networks, i.e. networks of free
associations among scientific concepts provided by students, teachers and researchers,
respectively. In 2017, the project involved 159 students, 12 teachers and 59 researchers
in cognitive experiments. Students were also involved in the outreach component of the
project, as they attended brief seminars revolving around the importance of STEM subjects
for modelling and understanding complex systems close to their daily experience such as
crowds, social systems and traffic. These seminars served as prototypes for designing
longer and more advanced courses about complexity science and they met the interest of
educators and school deans.
This talk will focus on the research component of Complex Forma Mentis, highlighting the
methodological approach of forma mentis networks and discussing their potential for
quantitatively identifying how students perceive and understand science.
CONTRIBUTED ABSTRACTS:
A Network Science Summer Course for High School Students
Florian Klimm, Oxford Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, UK
Benjamin F. Maier, Department of Physics, Humboldt University of Berlin, GERMANY
Teaching network science has been identified as an important endavour, because it is a
concept usually omitted in high school curricula. Based on the success of earlier,
short outreach events we decided to design a two-week summer course for German high
school pupils with the topic Networks and Complex Systems.
The course combined different didactic elements as lectures, student presentations,
problem sheets, programming exercises in Python, and smaller modules. The latter
included the creation of random graphs with the help of dice and the reproduction of
results from a research article. The pupils also created a floor plan network of the
school buildng at which the summer school was located and simulated the outbreak of
infectious diseases via Susceptible-Infected dynamics.
We think that network science is an appropriate topic to give pupils and introduction
to university-level science and mathematics, even for those that are not naturally
interested in such topics. We discuss various encountered challenges such as the
disparity in mathematical foundations or pre-existing programming experience and how
we approached them and to what extent our attempts were successful. We make our
teaching material available online at: https://github.com/floklimm/network-summer-school.
The "Small World" of Psychology: How do novices and experts
represent their conceptual knowledge structure of psychological science?
Cynthia S. Q. Siew and Thomas Hills, Department of Psychology, University of Warwick, UK
Cognitive representation of knowledge domains can be represented by topics (nodes) and
relationships between them (edges). How this changes in response to experience is an
indicator of domain fluency and, correspondingly, expertise. This presentation will
demonstrate how the combination of methods commonly used in the area of quantitative
knowledge representation in the cognitive sciences (i.e., the category fluency and
free associations tasks), as well as computational linguistics and network science
approaches can be used to characterize and quantify students' and experts' domain
knowledge in the area of psychology. Preliminary data from fluency and association
tasks completed by psychology students and psychology experts will be presented to
illustrate how network analysis can be used to (i) uncover structural differences in
the psychology association networks of novices and experts, and (ii) investigate
difference in the way that novices and experts navigate and search through a complex
semantic network representation of the psychological sciences. Implications for
research in the cognitive and educational sciences focusing on investigating how
students' conceptual structure of a subject matter influences learning and academic
performance and how novices acquire "expert-like" knowledge structures will be
discussed.
Entering the network world
Francesca Caloro, University of Salento and Sezione INFN Lecce, ITALY
This talk deals with my first experience with complex networks. I will report on how I
became acquainted with the basic notions concerning this subject, my understanding of
its relevance nowadays, and the impact on my education and curricular planning.
I came across network science by chance because there were no dedicated classes in my
graduate physics program. In fact, I had never heard about this field until I was
proposed to carry out a study on semantic networks as an exam topic within a course on
theoretical methods for nonlinear systems. This assignment involved an overview of
growing network processes from preferential attachment (Barabasi-Albert and closeness
centrality), the acquisition of principles of Python programming and the implementation
of a code to compare theoretical and numerical results.
Several contributions to my personal development have come from this experience:
1) I was introduced to the stimulating "networks world". This provided me with a new
vision of how mathematical notions have a surprising variety of applications, including
this very experience.
2) I had a first glimpse of what doing research and being part of a scientific team
means. In fact, my work was made possible as the result of a team composed of my
professor, a junior researcher and myself. A posteriori, I would say that this
represents a "network experiment based on a network experiment": the team was a small
social network itself, weighted on the basis of the individual working skills (e.g.
adaptability, prior knowledge). From this experience, I can conclude that small
networks with high weights could be very effective both in the acquisition of new
knowledge and in promoting solutions to problems through a better understanding of
networks.
3) My experience suggests that the spread of network theory is possible even when
network-oriented educational programs are not available. The exam project was a
fortuitous event but it proved that network theory can be introduced in some classes
with low effort, despite traditional syllabi not accounting for such a possibility.
This approach would definitely promote and increasing interest and the consequent
establishment of specific network-oriented courses, which offer transversal skills
of major relevance for many job opportunities.
From nets to networks: Network seeding for enhancing knowledge
Mario Angelelli, University of Salento and Sezione INFN Lecce, ITALY
The development of new technologies involving a large amount of data is drastically
changing both research and teaching methods. Despite the spread of efficient
techniques for dealing with data, specific situations may require different approaches
to manage them and make knowledge out of them. This raises the issue of scales in
knowledge-based social networks: we look at subnetworks (contexts) with small number
of interacting agents, but embedded and interconnected within larger networks with
slower characteristic time scales.
The focus on methods for an intensive investigation of such networks leads to
different types (or aspects) of interactions. This approach fits within various
cultural and social networks in Italy, including Academia and with special
reference to Southern Italy: they are organised as a system of several local
subnetworks, e.g. multilayer network, rather than a single-layer structure.
At least two dynamic scales coexist: a bottom-up dynamics driven by the actions
of small groups of agents, and a top-down one that originates from institutions.
Understanding the extent to which these dynamics are driven by common or different
factors, within a collective framework, could be relevant in the optimization of
cultural (educational, entrepreneurial, research) strategies and, hence, in the
valorization of intellectual capital.
We focus on the first (bottom-up) dynamics and mention two good practices in this
regard. The first is a new approach to enter the philosophy of networks, with a
learn-by-doing process testified by a M.S. student in Physics at University of
Salento (Lecce, IT). The second is the local realisation in Lecce of a national
network of contamination labs (CLab), with a suggestion of a ``network-of-networks''
entrepreneurship by an interdisciplinary work team, which is aimed at the detection
of connections between different (often hidden through large-scale tools) networks
and their role in Cultural and Creative activities. Advantages (in terms of
optimization and valorization) and drawbacks (in terms of energy-expense to create
and develop the network) of this contextual perspective are briefly discussed, in
relation to the results of surveys and auditing of cultural agents and stakeholders
for the Regional Strategic Plan for Culture.
E-POSTERS
Catherine Cramer1, Ralucca Gera2, Michaela Labriole1, Hiroki Sayama4,5,
Lori Sheetz3, Emma Towlson5, and Stephen Uzzo1
1 New York Hall of Science
2 Naval Postgraduate School
3 Center for Leadership and Diversity in STEM, U.S. Military Academy at West Point
4 Center for Collective Dynamics of Complex Systems, Binghamton University
5 Center for Complex Network Research, Northeastern University
The poster is available here.
Five years of Mediterranean School of Complex Networks: Lessons and Outlooks
Manlio De Domenico, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, ITALY The Mediterranean School of Complex Network (MSCx) is an international summer school
taking place every year in Salina island (Sicily, Italy). The goal of MSCx is to provide a theoretical
background to young researchers (Master, PhD, early Postdocs) in the field of complex
networks, with particular attention to current trends in Network Science. The organization
of MSCx, and its strict relationship with the territory, allows us to promote philosophical and scientific exchange between all lecturers and attendants. In this talk we will review the
adapative approach adopted to develop MSCx from its first edition to the fifth one and we
will show the metrics used for the continuous evaluation of its success.
The poster is available here.