All staff and research scientists will each transition to one of two affiliated institutes: the Observatory on Social Media (OSoMe) or the Irsay Institute. Staff will continue to work on current projects through their completion. The two institutes may pursue a joint networks program in the future.

Thank you for your interest and support in the past nine years. If you have questions, you may contact former IUNI staff at iuni@iu.edu, which is being monitored through 2023.

The new measure and tool, E-index, emerges from a paper Erkol, Sikdar, Radicchi and Fortunato collaborated on, Consistency pays off in science, that takes a look at what publication strategy offers more chances of success: publishing lots of papers, producing a few hit papers — or something in between.

The pace in the number of scientific papers published over the past several years and decades has grown exponentially. This explosion has led to a discussion on the interplay between how much output a scholar produces versus how well that work is received by their field.

The article takes a look at these issues by studying the scientific output portfolios of laureates of the Nobel Prize. A comparative analysis of several existing citation-based indicators of individual impact suggests that the best path to success may rely on consistently producing high-quality work. Such a pattern is especially rewarded by a new metric, the E-index, which identifies excellence better than state-of-the-art measures.

The E-index Portal allows users to compute metrics of individual scientific excellence, including your own E-index. You can find which percentile you occupy in your field (or fields). You can also compare yourself with someone else. The portal uses data from OpenAlex. (Although that data often includes multiple duplicates of an author, one entry will usually hold most of the publications.)

Congratulations to Santo Fortunato and Olaf Sporns, who were named Society Fellows of the Network Science Society at a session on July 27 during the society’s annual NetSci 2022 conference!

Dr. Fortunato, Director of the IU Network Science Institute, and Dr. Sporns, member of the IUNI Advisory Council, were part of a class of seven 2022 Fellows.

Society Fellows are nominated by their peers and selected by the Fellowship Committee, composed of prominent researchers active in the area of network science, on the basis of their outstanding, exceptional, and significant life-long individual contributions to any area of network science research and to the community, locally and globally, of network scientists.

No more than seven Society Fellows are chosen annually. Rounding out the distinguished 2022 class of are Vittoria Colizza, Noshir Contractor, Fan Chung, Byungnam Kahng, and Yamir Moreno. They join 27 previously selected Society Fellows.

Indiana University Bloomington Provost and Executive Vice President Rahul Shrivastav has announced IUNI Advisory Council Member Brea Perry as the Interim Vice Provost for Research, effective July 1, 2022.

Perry has served as associate vice provost for the social sciences in the Office of the Vice Provost for Research at IU Bloomington since Jan. 1, 2020. She is the Allen D. and Polly S. Grimshaw Professor of Sociology and an Associate Director of the Irsay Family Research Institute.

“Brea has supported social science faculty through programming, helping advance research agendas, and fostering connections to help researchers more easily secure fellowships and external grants,” Shrivastav said. “Her focus on interdisciplinary research and innovation perfectly matches our campus goals at large, and I look forward to working with Brea to advance our research efforts in these areas.”

Read more about Dr. Perry’s appointment.

The research team’s findings indicated that to better support a patient’s informal caregivers (including treatment partners) and to grow the quality of relationships with treatment partners, interventions help and improve the quality of life and health outcomes for individuals living with HIV.

The full text of Dr. Green’s article will be available via Open Access for free for the near future.

Dr. Green is Associate Professor in the Department of Applied Health Science at the School of Public Health. He is also Continuity Lead at the Irsay Family Research Institute. His research encompasses three areas: peer effects on alcohol, tobacco, and drug use; the association of social support and behavior; and developing methodologies to support personal network analysis.

It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Valentin T. Pentchev, IUNI’s IT Director, on New Year’s Eve at the age of 48. Val, as we knew him, was kind, positive, entrepreneurial, and a consummate networker — of people, ideas, and technologies.

He is survived by his wife, Liana Apostolova, faculty at the IU School of Medicine, and his sons Julian and Martin Pentchev. Val was passionate about so many things: food, travel, cars, technology, bespoke cocktail recipes, and his Bulgarian heritage. We will miss his infectious enthusiasm.

Val was the first staff person hired at IUNI nearly seven years ago, and he has had a hand in almost every major project we have ever undertaken. We will move forward to support the projects he cared about so deeply, including the Collaborative Archive & Data Research Environment and the Observatory on Social Media, but we know it will not be the same without him.

You may find Val’s obituary listed at Forest Lawn Funeral Home of Greenwood, where you can leave a message for his family and see service details. Memorial contributions to continue Val’s legacy may be made to the Bulgarian Cultural Society Foundation.

Val’s colleagues at the Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub have penned a tribute to Val’s participation in the Hub community.

If you have an ongoing project you were working on with Val and you need assistance, please email us at iuni@iu.edu and we will work to support you.

IUNI led and hosted Networks 2021, planning for which spanned over five years. This gathering was initially scheduled to take place in person in Washington, D.C., but transitioned to an all-virtual event as pandemic travel and social distancing restrictions continued across the globe.

Networks 2021 began on June 21 with two weeks of workshops and satellite sessions. The main conference started on July 5 and continued through July 10. The gathering featured nearly 1,000 scholarly talks delivered across over 160 parallel sessions. IUNI Advisory Council Member Brea Perry (Professor, IU Sociology) presented in one of the four plenary talks, a discussion about the social brain and mental illness.

The PDF of the final program of the main conference is the historical record of Networks 2021. This 882-page volume is fully searchable and contains abstracts for most of the nearly 1,000 scholarly talks presented.

Attendees from both INSNA and NetSci expressed support for continuing to regularly combine the annual meetings of the two societies every few years, and leadership from the two societies will consider this. Upcoming meetings for the societies are planned for 2022. NetSci’s next meeting, NetSci 2022, will be in Shanghai, China during June and July. NetSciX will take place February 8–11 in Porto, Portugal, likely in a virtual setting. INSNA will hold Sunbelt XLII in Cairns, Australia, July 12–16.

Ahn, Kojaku, and their team published their recent findings in Nature Physics. 

In the paper, researchers show that backward contact tracing, or tracing from whom disease spreads, is highly effective at identifying super-spreading events, which can potentially prevent a large number of transmissions if the tracing is strategically executed. Forward tracing, on the other hand, requires tracing who the disease spreads to.

Findings also indicate that, although it is difficult to identify the direction of spreading in practice, backward-aiming contact tracing can be done effectively by prioritizing those who appear multiple times during the tracing. 

Controlling an epidemic such as COVID-19 requires finding and isolating infected individuals as quickly as possible—which is typically aided by contract tracing efforts.

The team says a revision of current contact-tracing strategies to leverage all forms of bias may improve the effectiveness of contact tracing. They also point out that incorporating backward and deep tracing—while ensuring privacy of individuals—may be crucial for digital contact-tracing programs to succeed.

“I think this is a good example that demonstrates the power of network perspective,” Ahn said. “By formulating the contact tracing problem in terms of contact network structure, we could formulate a clear mathematical explanation that teases out two directions of contact tracing.”

The research

The researchers focused on the most effective contract tracing measures, finding backward tracing is far more effective in preventing mass spread of a disease than forward tracing. Backward tracing allows for leveraging the biases in the heterogeneity of the contact network, as well as a simple bias: The more infections an index case produces, the more frequently they will show up as a common contact in tracing. 

Ahn and his team say effective (digital) contract tracing that can appropriately leverage backward contact tracing may be crucial for controlling any future epidemic.

You an read their paper here. Interested in seeing what IUNI Affiliates are doing during the pandemic? Check out our other blog posts.

The VCSC is a team of faculty and students at the University of Vermont’s College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences who are working to solve real-world complex systems problems.

VCSC’s external faculty cohort honors scholars who foster a welcoming complex systems community and collaborate often across institutions, including with the center. The external faculty members will collaborate on research, mentor students, and create an academic support network across their institutions and with the VCSC.

Patania is a computational topologist focused on developing new topological approaches to study complex systems and applying those approaches to brain and social networks. She currently serves as a principal investigator of the R21 NIH grant “Integrative Predictive Modeling of Alzheimer’s Disease,” where she develops models for the joint analysis of genomics and neuroimaging data. 

Outside of her research, Patania is dedicated to strengthening the voices of other women mathematicians who do multidisciplinary work: She’s currently co-organizing a workshop with VCSC that will give more visibility to women in mathematics who perform multidisciplinary research (stay tuned for event details!).

Patania will serve a five-year term and take part in external faculty retreats. She will also have the opportunity to lecture at VCSC workshops and conferences and collaborate on the center’s research endeavors.

Read the announcement here.

Earlier this month, IUNI Advisory Council Members Bernice Pescosolido and Brea Perry (IUB Sociology) published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that found the pandemic has widened the gap between the “haves” and “have nots.” 

Black adults were three times as likely as white adults to report food insecurity, as well as being laid off or unemployed, during the pandemic. Those without a college degree were twice as likely to report food insecurity than those with some college. In one stunning contrast, people who reported not to have completed high school were four times more likely to experience food insecurity than those with a bachelor’s degree.

The study also found women typically struggled with food insecurity more than men and that younger people had more employment insecurity than older people.

In a recent Herald-Times article covering the study, Perry said, “One of the big take-home points is that these findings provide additional evidence that when there’s some sort of crisis — whether economic, a natural disaster, human made — these exacerbate inequalities.

“They reflect the societal fault lines that were there before and tend to make them worse,” she continued.

Perry and Pescosolido conducted the phone study by following up with participants from their Person to Person Study, which had been conducted with Indiana residents prior to and at the start of the pandemic. This allowed the researchers to compare respondents’ livelihoods before and during the pandemic. The 20-minute survey had a 70 percent response rate.

The researchers are planning to follow up on their study to investigate the long-term health effects of COVID-19, such as chronic stress from ongoing economic insecurity. Perry and Pescosolido are also interested in understanding how respondents leaned into informal safety nets in their social networks to get through the pandemic.

• Read the initial study, “Pandemic precarity: COVID-19 is exposing and exacerbating inequalities in the American heartland,” from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences here.
• Read The Herald-Times coverage of the study here.
• Read the report on the study from IU Research Impact here.
• Read the recent coverage in the Indiana Daily Student here.