NetSci 2006 was a success!
SLIS faculty member, Katy Börner (one of the conference organizers) wrote:
The almost two week long International Workshop and Conference on Network Science was attended by more than 200 researchers, practitioners and students from more than 25 fields of science -- such as sociology, IT, physics, CS, management, psychology, biology, economics, scientometrics, etc.
All tutorial slides and all conference presentations are linked from http://vw.indiana.edu/netsci06 for general consumption and usage.
As the visualization of "Registered Attendees at NetSci 2006" (see photo) - (and the conference schedule) indicates, participants from France, Japan, Germany, Korea, Israel, Italy, Mexico, and many other locations were in attendance.
Poster Competition:
Visualizing the Landscape of U.S. University Patents - Margaret Clements, Todd Holloway, HyunSeung Koh, Adity Mutsuddi (Indiana University) won third place in the Best Conference Poster Awards.
HyunSeung Koh is a SLIS Master of Information Science student, Todd Holloway and Adity Mutsuddi are doctoral students in the Computer Science Department. All three took Katy Börner's SLIS-L579 (Information Visualization - "IV") class during the Spring 2006 semester, and worked on this project with Margaret Clements (doctoral student in the School of Education). Other SLIS participants in the poster competition included: John Burgoon, Shashikant Penumarthy, Katy Börner and Soma Sanyal.
The International Workshop and Conference on Network Science (NetSci 2006) was held over a two week period at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, during May 2006.
Earlier this spring, Katy Börner gave insights to the goals of the conference: "This Workshop and Conference brings together major researchers and practitioners that study networks and their impact on our lives. By 'networks' we refer to any system that allows its abstract/mathematical representation as a graph."
To help explain the research for the conference, she provided an excerpt from:
Boerner, Katy and Vespignani, Alessandro. Network Science: A Theoretical and Practical Framework. Submitted to Blaise Cronin (Ed.), Annual Review of Information Science & Technology, Volume 37, Medford, NJ: Information Today, Inc./American Society for Information Science and Technology.
"At any moment in time, we are driven by and are an integral part of many interconnected, dynamically changing networks. Our neurons fire, cells are signaling to each other, our organs work in concert. The attack of a cancer cell might impact all of these networks and it will also impact our social and behavioral networks if we become conscious of the attack. Our species has evolved as part of diverse ecological, biological, social and other networks over thousands of years. As part of a complex food web, we learned how to find prey and to avoid predators. We have created advanced socio-technical environments in the shape of cities, water and power systems, street and airline systems, etc. In 1969, people started to interlink computers leading to the largest and most widely used networked infrastructure in existence today: The Internet. The Internet facilitated the emergence of the world-wide web, a virtual network that interconnects billions of web pages, datasets, services, and human users. Thanks to the digitization of books, papers, patents, grants, court cases, news reports etc. along with the explosion of wikipedia entries, emails, blogs, etc. we now have a digital copy of a major part of humanity's knowledge and evolution. Yet, while the amount of knowledge produced per day is growing at an accelerating rate, our main means to access mankind's knowledge is search engines that retrieve matching entities and facilitate local search based on linkages, e.g., references or web links. But, it is not only factual knowledge that matters. The more global the problems we need to master as a species the more in need we are to identify and understand major connections, trends, patterns in data, information, and knowledge. We are in desperate need to manipulate, characterize, model, and understand the structure and function of large networked physical and information systems."
Details from the NetSci 2006 website:
NetSci 2006 Organizers
Albert-László Barabàsi, University of Notre Dame
Katy Börner, Indiana University
Noshir S. Contractor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign & NCSA
Alessandro Vespignani, Indiana University
Stanley Wasserman, Indiana University
The primary objective of the Workshop/Conference was to facilitate interactions between the many different disciplines interested in and utilizing network science.
From May 16-20, the NetSci 2006 Workshop featured tutorials by 15 researchers from statistics, mathematics, physics, and the social and behavioral, and information sciences.
From May 22-25, the NetSci 2006 Conference held invited talks by social and behavioral scientists, information scientists, biologists, statistical physicists, mathematicians and statisticians.
Posted June 01, 2006