Network Science for the Sustainable Development Goals

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted by all United Nations Member States in 2015, constitute a roadmap of the broad set of challenges that our society is facing today - from ending poverty, hunger and gender inequalities, to ensuring quality education and tackling sustainability issues. Networks Science is increasingly being employed to investigate such issues, from forecasting epidemics, assessing the impact of sudden onset emergencies, to estimating population demographics. However, the gap between the academic world and the organizations that could use the proposed methods and insights for their programmatic purposes is still wide.

This workshop aims at fostering discussions on the role of network science in addressing the societal challenges framed by the SDGs. This will be achieved by showcasing relevant theoretical, empirical and operational work within network science research that can be applied for the benefit of humanity, focusing on the investigation of network-based techniques for evidence-based policy-making.

Topics of interest will be (but are not limited to):

• Novel network methods for identifying and measuring vulnerabilities (poverty, lack of information, exposure to conflict, resilience to natural disasters, epidemic risk, bullying, discrimination, etc.).

• Data availability: novel open network data sets and studies on representativeness and bias, algorithmic privacy, transparency and fairness in the context of social good applications.

• Replicability and transferability of models in vulnerable and data-poor contexts; model interpretability in support of better decision making.

• From data to policy making: operationalized network science research for crafting sustainable solutions that can be globally scaled.

The first edition took place online in 2020: https://sites.google.com/view/netsci4sdgs/.