WAW 2024

University of Burgundy

Bio:
Hocine Cherifi has been a Full Professor of Computer Science at the University of Burgundy in Dijon, France, since 1999. Before joining the University of Burgundy, he held faculty positions at Rouen University and Jean Monnet University in France. Throughout his career, he held visiting positions at prestigious institutions such as Yonsei University in Korea, the University of Western Australia, National Pintung University in Taiwan, and Galatasaray University in Turkey.

His primary research interests lie in Computer Vision and Complex Networks. He has made significant contributions to his areas of expertise, having published over 250 scientific papers in international journals and conference proceedings. He has actively contributed to the academic community by assuming leadership roles in more than 20 international conference organizations, including General Chair and Program Chair positions. Additionally, he has served on over 100 program committees.

Hocine Cherifi founded the International Conference on Complex Networks & their Applications. Furthermore, he serves as the Founding Editor-in-Chief of the Applied Network Science journal and, more recently, PLOS Complex Systems.

Complexity Science Hub Vienna

Bio:
Fariba Karimi is a full professor of data science at Graz University of Technology and the leader of "Network Inequality" Group at Complexity Science Hub Vienna. She has made significant contributions to the field of social complexity and digital humanism, particularly in the study of inequalities in networks and algorithms. She has a background in computational social science, complex systems, physics, and data science. In 2023, she received the prestigious Young Scientist Award from the German Physics Society for her work in the area of network science and social good.

Delft University of Technology

Bio:
Julia obtained her PhD at the Budapest University of Technology under the supervision of Marton Balazs and Karoly Simon. She obtained an internship at Microsoft Research Redmond, a STAR tenure-track position financed by the Dutch Research Council, and is a laureate of the `Innovative Research VENI Scheme' 2014. Since 2021 she is an associate professor at TU Delft.

Her research focuses on uncovering the universalities present across a wide range of processes that live on complex networks, and discovering the cause for these universal phenomena. For instance, spreading processes in various scenarios are known to spread extremely fast on complex networks where `superspreaders' are present, let that be a virus or a rumor on a human contact network, a video or meme on an online network, or a computer virus on the internet. By studying stylized probabilistic models for the underlying networks and processes, Julia uncovers which structural and topological properties of the underlying graph and mechanisms of the process give rise to the phenomenon (and which are irrelevant).

University of California, Los Angeles

Abstract: I will discuss the modeling of opinion dynamics on various types of networks. I will start by introducing some general questions and ideas in the modeling of social dynamics. I will then focus on bounded-confidence models (BCMs), in which agents have continuous-valued opinions and update those opinions when they interact with agents with sufficiently similar opinions. I will discuss various generalizations of BCMs and examine how they affect consensus, polarization, and fragmentation of opinions in BCMs.

Bio:
Mason A. Porter is a professor in the Department of Mathematics at UCLA. He also has a secondary appointment in UCLA's Department of Sociology and is an External Professor of Santa Fe Institute. Mason earned his B.S. in Applied Mathematics at Caltech in 1998 and his Ph.D. from the Center for Applied Mathematics at Cornell University in 2002. After postdoctoral positions at Georgia Tech, Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, and Caltech, Mason joined the faculty in the Mathematical Institute at University of Oxford in 2007. He moved to UCLA in 2016.

Mason studies many topics in complex systems, networks, and nonlinear systems. Thus far, twenty-six PhD students have completed their doctorates under Mason's mentorship; he has also mentored many postdoctoral scholars and undergraduate students. In 2017, Mason received the Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) Faculty Mentoring Award (Advanced Career Category) in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division. Mason is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, the American Physical Society, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

Plenary Speakers