CEU Center for Network Science

The Center for Network Science (CNS) was founded in 2009 at Central European University (CEU) in Budapest, Hungary and is intended to provide an organizational platform for network science research. Also, the Center aims at becoming an important hub in European network study. The research focus of CNS is practical social problems. The Center also offers a non-degree certificate for PhD students at Economics and Political Science of CEU.^[1] Balázs Vedres, director of CNS introduces the Center in this short video.

Faculty and Staff

The members of the faculty are from different background, which provide a truly interdisciplinary atmosphere.

Balázs Vedres – Director of CNS, Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University. Main interests: economic sociology, social networks, historical sociology, postsocialism, and methods.

Albert-László Barabási – Part-time faculty member, recurrent visitor.

Jean-Louis Fabiani - Professor at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University. Main interests: sociology of culture, academic production, the sociology of science, and discourse processes.

Levente Littvay – Visiting Lecturer in multiple departments of the Eötvös Lorand University and the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Psychology. Main interests: new analytical strategies to complex problems and research questions in any field of science, exploration of a number of statistical questions, assessment of electoral systems and the genetics of social and political behavior. Previous studies: evolutionary game theory, agent based computer simulations, macro-comparative exploration of the relationship between corruption and democratic performance.

Pal Hegedűs - Assistant Professor at the Department of Mathematics and its Applications, Central European University.

Viktor Lagutov - Research Fellow at the Department of Environmental Sciences and Policy, head of Environmental Systems Laboratory. Main interests: complex systems, environmental protection, and computer programming.

External CNS Affiliates

Marco Scotti - Post-doc fellow at the Center for Network Science, Central European University. Main interests: ecosystem network analysis (trophic structure, centralities and topological regularities), environmental management (Ecological Footprint, territorial planning and management, Environmental Impact Assessment) and the comparison of structure and functioning between ecological systems and social networks.

Antonio Bodini - Researcher at the Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Parma. Main interest: ecosystem ecology, ecological modeling and environmental impact assessment, with applications to ecosystem management focusing on networks.

Ferenc Jordán - researcher at Microsoft Research – University of Trento, Centre for Compuptational and Systems Biology, Trento, Italy. Main interests: the role of central nodes in ecological and social networks (including food webs, landscape graphs, human and animal social networks, webs of international relations and molecular networks)

Károly Takács (Corvinus University) - Assistant Professor at Institute of Sociology and Social Policy, Corvinus University of Budapest. Main interests: theoretical, experimental, and empirical analysis of the dynamics of social networks, group dynamics and intergroup conflict.

Events

June 6–10, 2011. NetSci 2011: The International School and Conference on Network Science ^[2]

January 28, 2010. Circuits of Profit: Business Network Research Conference This one day conference brought together academics and practitioners from to discuss issues ranging from organizational restructuring and political lobbying and corruption, to marketing, and finance. The conference was organized together with Maven7 and the Hungarian Sociological Association.^[3]^[4]

June 17–18, 2009. Conference. The Unexpected Link: Using Network Science to Tackle Social Problems Featured topics of the conference were networks linking nature and society; global networks of risk; teams of collaboration - creativity and collusion; the emergence of social order; organizations, markets, and governance; biological webs and human impacts on the environment; bridging the gap between social and biological networks, as well as future directions in network science and transnational - interdisciplinary collaborations: what should a center for network science aim at? ^[5]

PhD Program

The Central European University offers Phd programs in Economics and in Political Science with a certificate in Network Science. The Center for Network Science provides an organizational platform for research using network science tools. The students have to take some mandatory and elective courses of the Center of Network Science to participate.^[6]

Research projects

Ceunet CNS’s own software for analysis and handling of network data. The software is still under development focusing on the following functions: conversion and handling, role analysis/blockmodeling, second-order ties, and simultaneous handling of attributional and relational data. This is a freeware software.^[7]

Mapping European Network Science (2010) In this project the co-authorship network of European scholars, who presented any paper at INSNA Sunbelt conferences or the NetSci annual conferences between 2005 and 2008 is mapped. The conclusion is basically that the European network science is very fragmented. Growing more cohesive would mean a higher scientific impact as component size and citation count have a positive correlation.^[8]

Honors

The article of Balázs Vedres, director of Center for Network Science, won two prestigious prizes in 2011. The title of the paper is “Structural Folds: Generative Disruption in Overlapping Groups” ^[9] and is co-authored with David Stark. It aims at analyzing the relationship between structural folds in a business group and the emergence of innovations and new, creative ideas. The awards are the 2011 Viviana Zelizer Award from the American Sociological Association (ASA), which is given every year to the authors of an outstanding article in the field of economic sociology and the 2011 Roger V. Gould Prize from the editorial board of The American Journal of Sociology (AJS) The board of the AJS commented on the decision as follows: “While eligible papers were drawn from 72 AJS articles published over a two-year period, the list of contenders was eventually narrowed down to eight finalists, all of them very fine papers. The AJS editorial board was impressed by [the awardees’] use of real-world data to isolate key structural features of networks likely to generate innovation and creativity. The argument is theoretically rich and analytically meticulous; it lays bare important features of networks of entrepreneurial collaboration while offering, more generally, a compelling story about the dynamism of social groups. And specifically we liked the fact that [Vedres and Stark] are trying to push networks towards dynamism. The paper may not have all the answers, but it is bold and ambitious. We’re very pleased to offer this article special recognition.” ^[10]