"The Cyclops," painted by Odilon Redon, 1914. Via Wikipedia
The origin of our eyes over half a billion years ago is looking more and more weird--from a cyclops to four eyes to two. Here's my story (gift link): nyti.ms/4rzisQP
From @philipncohen.com, a case for discussing our policy on AI-generated research.
Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions Reshape Network Immunization Outcomes arxiv.org/abs/2602.17360
This is finally out.
Very short take home. All the variation in spike that produced the immune escape characteristics of Omicron can occur in one single persistently infected individual over the period of a year.
This is why persistent infections matter
www.cell.com/cell-reports...
In Yan Xia's defence, the opponent Prof. Taha Yasseri makes observations on her thesis. Yan and the custos Mikko Kivelä listen. The list of publications included in Yan's thesis "Understanding the (de)polarized social media" is shown on the screen.
From left to right: the custos Prof. Mikko Kivelä, the advisor Prof. Barbara Keller, the doctoral student Yan Xia, and the opponent Prof. Taha Yasseri, right after the defence.
Silja Sormunen presents her thesis "Beyond critical points: Critical manifolds in self-organizing systems" in front of the opponent Prof. Anna Levina and the custos Prof. Jari Saramäki. Visualization of a critical manifold is shown on the screen.
Silja Sormunen and the opponent Prof. Anna Levina have a discussion in front of the audience.
We had two very successful defences in our group this January. Huge congratulations to Dr Yan Xia @yanxxia.bsky.social and Dr Silja Sormunen!
Very cool paper! We've worked on a related problem (but only theoretically). In case it's of interest: doi.org/10.1103/Phys...
Computational Social Scientists in the Nordics, unite!
🇩🇰🇫🇮🇳🇴🇸🇪🇮🇸
The brand new Nordic Society for CSS welcomes all researchers and practitioners based in the Nordics. The Society will promote student mobility, events, and education initiatives.
Join for free: nosocss.org/join.html.
What if birds of a feather flock together, but only at specific group sizes?
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
This is the focus of our new paper, now published in Nature Communications. We introduce a new network model and show how to model and measure homophily to incorporate group variations.
Late advertisement of our new pre-print:
Contact structure and population immunity shape the selective advantage of emerging variants www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...
🧵1/
A bit late to the party, but I want to introduce a pet project of mine—and my first single-author paper! 🎉
It tackles something that has quietly frustrated me for years: how we measure the similarity of two clusterings/community structures.
Latest out: Fairness in infectious disease modeling. Great collaboration with Yuhan Li, @ngozzi.bsky.social @mtizzoni.bsky.social www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...
The next seminar is scheduled for tomorrow (Nov 4) with Kashin Sugishita at the Institute of Science Tokyo, who will be talking about air transport networks. If you're interested, please sign up from sites.google.com/view/cxrex and you'll receive Zoom links and announcements for future seminars.
Our aim is to create opportunities to hear from early to mid-career researchers in the field of complex systems science (broadly defined) about their research. We've had 20 talks over the past two years. The seminar times are tailored to people in East Asia, but everyone is welcome to attend.
Home page of the Complex Systems Research Exchange website. It reads: Complex Systems Research Exchange (CREx) is an online seminar series aimed at building an international research community in the interdisciplinary field of complex systems, very broadly defined. Our focus is on creating opportunities to hear from early to mid-career researchers about their research, while also serving as a platform for networking and collaboration. We are open to a wide range of research areas including network science, nonlinear dynamics, dynamical systems, computational social science, science of science, machine learning and AI, data science, urban science and human mobility, mathematical biology and ecology, neuroscience, and more. Please subscribe to the mailing list to receive announcements of upcoming seminars. The Zoom link for each seminar will be sent to the mailing list shortly before the seminar. Please reach out to organizers if you are interested in giving a presentation yourself or know someone who would be interested. This seminar series is run on a volunteer basis and is currently organized without funding. Organizers: Jeehye Choi, Takayuki Hiraoka, Inho Hong, Hyewon Kim, Kazuki Nakajima, Ayumi Ozawa, Taekho You
A semi-regular reminder: My colleagues and I are running an interdisciplinary online seminar series called Complex Systems Research Exchange (CREx🦖).
sites.google.com/view/cxrex
Illustration of the Matthew effect and the early-career setback effect. An academic, say Alice, first applies for early-career funding in 2015. She received early-career funding, and goes on to reapply for later-career funding in 2020. According to the Matthew effect, the chances of Alice receiving later-career funding is higher when she received early-career funding. Alice showed a high Mean Field Citation Rate (MFCR) before receiving her early-career funding, and similarly a high MFCR in between the early-career and later-career applications. According to the early-career setback effect, had she instead not received funding, her "Between" MFCR would have been higher. We not only study the "Between" MFCR, we also study the MFCR after the early-career application ("Post (early)") and after the later-career application ("Post (later)").
📢 New reviewed preprint, published by @elife.bsky.social at doi.org/10.7554/eLif.... We study two effects in science funding across 14 different funding programmes from 6 research funders across Europe and North America: (1) The Matthew effect; and (2) and the early-career setback effect.
🧵1/8
Reminder: Last chance to apply for our postdoc positions in polarisation + mental well-being: www.aalto.fi/en/open-posi...
There are a few words that are clearly mispronounced, and the articulation is sometimes off. It also said that the presentation is by “Professor Kim”. But overall, it’s quite impressive how naturally it imitates a podcast-like conversation.
Science isn’t really moving towards equity; institutions are just perfecting the appearance of equity. We need to build an alternative system, says Dolors Armenteras
go.nature.com/4nzGhp9
We are hiring multiple PhD and postdocs for two newly funded projects at the intersection of mental health and political polarization at the CS Dept at Aalto, Finland. The PIs are Juhi Kulshrestha, Talayeh Aledavood, and Mikko Kivelä.
Full call text and link to apply: www.aalto.fi/en/open-posi...
Celebrating the publication of our big collaborative spatial-social meta-analysis of density-dependent transmission effects, out now in Nature Eco Evo! doi.org/10.1038/s415... (or rdcu.be/eD6eB)
Who knows, a conference in B_looming_ton might also be looming closer than you think😂
Interesting that every conference in 2026 takes place in a city called "B...ton" in a rather small corner of the world.
A world map showing the locations of cities that hosted/will host international scientific conferences in 2025 and 2026. NetSci 2025 Maastricht, IC2S2 2025 Norkköping, and CCS 2025 Siena are on the left-hand side, while NetSci 2026 Boston, IC2S2 2026 Burlington, and CCS 2026 Binghamton are close together on the right-hand side.
Q: How are resources consumed in transportation networks, and how does this shape the overall functioning of the system?
We introduce the minimum-cost percolation framework and apply it to the U.S. air transportation system using publicly available data.
🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
We show that this approach is effective for citation networks, for which we would typically want the effect of publication dates to be discounted. It can be applied to other contexts too. Project led by Hasti Narimanzadeh and done in collaboration with Mikko Kivelä @bolozna.bsky.social
Our paper about discounting the influence of node attributes from detected communities in networks is out in Physical Review E!
journals.aps.org/pre/abstract...
Happy to share this long-overdue project! We found that many real-world event sequences follow a surprisingly similar hierarchically structured pattern, and that multi-timescale memory mechanisms can explain this pattern. Feedback welcome!
arxiv.org/abs/2508.18281
Our new preprint with @takayukihir.bsky.social is out in arXiv: Takayuki Hiraoka and Hang-Hyun Jo, Hierarchical organization of bursty trains in event sequences, arxiv.org/abs/2508.18281
