The CIRSS speaker series continues in Fall 2024 with a new theme of “Studying Science Scientifically: State of the Art and Prospects for the Science of Science.” With the availability of increasingly rich data sources, exciting new technologies for understanding natural language, and modeling methodologies taken from diverse domains of scholarship, the opportunities to observe, measure, and model the structure and dynamics of the scientific enterprise abound as never before. Presentations in this series will illustrate the breadth of advances that have been made, and are yet to be made, by researchers in the information, computing, and social sciences among others in this blossoming field.
We meet most Fridays, 11am-noon US Central Time, on Zoom. Our Fall series will be led by Yuanxi Fu and Timothy McPhillips This event is open to the public, and everyone is welcome to attend. The series is hosted by the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS) of the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. If you have any questions, please contact Janet Eke.
Participate: To join a live session, follow the “Join Here” link for the current week below to access the iSchool event page for the talk. There click the “PARTICIPATE online” button to join the live Zoom session. Recordings of past talks can be found via the “Recording” links below if available.
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Fall 2024 Speakers
Santo Fortunato, Indiana University Bloomington
Friday September 13, 2024, 11am-noon CT
Title: Navigating the new science of science: impact, collaboration, excellence
Abstract: Science of science is the investigation of science as a system, via analysis and modeling of data on scientists and their interactions. I will present results from our group on three key pillars of the discipline: impact, collaboration, and excellence. On impact, we found that the distributions of citations of papers published in the same discipline and year rescale to a universal curve, by properly normalizing the raw number of cites. I will show that active authors in a certain field may induce their collaborators to work in that field, especially if they are highly productive and cited. Also, I will discuss the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on scientific collaboration. Finally, I will show that the lag between the year of the Nobel discovery and the year of the award has been growing exponentially over the years. What does this mean for science? No Nobels = No progress?
Bio: Santo Fortunato is a Professor at Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering of Indiana University. Previously he was professor of complex systems at the Department of Computer Science of Aalto University, Finland. Prof. Fortunato got his PhD in Theoretical Particle Physics at the University of Bielefeld In Germany. His focus areas are network science, especially community detection in graphs, computational social science and science of science. His research has been published in leading journals, including Nature, Science, Nature Physics, PNAS, Physical Review Letters, Physical Review X, Reviews of Modern Physics, Physics Reports and has collected over 47,000 citations (Google Scholar). His single-author article Community detection in graphs (Physics Reports 486, 75-174, 2010) is one of the best known and most cited papers in network science. Fortunato received the Young Scientist Award for Socio- and Econophysics 2011, a prize given by the German Physical Society, for his outstanding contributions to the physics of social systems. He is Fellow of the Network Science Society (2022) and of the American Physical Society (2022). He is the Founding Chair of the International Conference of Computational Social Science (IC2S2), which he first organized in Helsinki in June 2015. He was Chair of Networks 2021, the largest ever event on network science, a historical merger of the NetSci and Sunbelt conferences. He is author of the book A First Course in Network Science, by Cambridge University Press (2020), the most accessible textbook on the new science of networks.
Thomas Stoeger, Northwestern University
Friday September 20, 2024, 11am-noon CT
Title: Science of Science as a Tool for Biomedical Discovery
Abstract: Biomedical research has traditionally concentrated on a small subset of genes that were extensively studied in the 1980s and 1990s. This focus has led to surprising gaps in our knowledge: typically, half of the genes that are important to disease, according to unbiased data, have never been mentioned in any research articles. Since this gap persists despite being noted two decades ago, my research seeks to understand why this lack of investigation continues. Building on these insights, I have developed hypotheses on how to effectively study a broader set of genes. To test these hypotheses, I took a significant career risk by personally applying them to a scientific field in which I had no prior experience. This effort led to the discovery of Gene Length-dependent Transcription Decline, a molecular phenomenon that explains changes in gene activity during human aging. Lastly, I will briefly present an unpublished AI-enabled investigation of the historical archives of the Human Genome Project and the National Human Genome Research Institute.
Bio: Thomas Stoeger is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care at Northwestern University, where he established his laboratory in October 2023. He previously joined Northwestern as a data science scholar for his postdoctoral research. He graduated from the University of Zurich in 2016, where he received the annual award for the best PhD thesis in the sciences. His postdoctoral research earned him the K99/R00 Postdoc-to-Tenure-Track Award from the National Institute on Aging.
Luibov Tupikina, Nokia Bell Labs
Friday October 4, 2024, 11am-noon CT
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Talk details coming soon.
Vincent Larivière, University of Montreal
Friday October 11, 2024, 11am-noon CT
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Talk details coming soon.
Meicen Sun, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Friday October 18, 2024, 11am-noon CT
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Maksim Kitsak, Delft University of Technology
Friday November 8, 2024, 11am-noon CT
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Alexander Furnas, Northwestern University
Friday November 15, 2024, 11am-noon CT
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Chaoqun Ni, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Friday November 22, 2024, 11am-noon CT
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Sarah Bratt, University of Arizona
Friday December 6, 2024, 11am-noon CT
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Talk details coming soon.