Frank Takes

Computer science department (LIACS)
Leiden University

PRESENTATION

Bio:
Frank Takes is an assistant professor at the computer science department (LIACS) of Leiden University. His main research interest is in network science, mostly dealing with the computational and algorithmic aspects of methods in the field. Applications addressed within his Leiden Computational Network Science (CNS) Lab include the analysis of online social networks, technological networks, economic and financial networks and networks in the infrastructure domain. Since 2017, Frank is involved in the organization of a yearly workshop on Mining Actionable Insights from Social Networks (MAISoN). In 2019, Frank was general chair of the International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2). He is an organizer of the Leiden Complex Networks Network (LCN2) and a board member of the Dutch Network Science Society. Frank teaches an MSc level course on social network analysis for computer scientists in Leiden as well as a course on social network analysis at King’s College in London, UK.

Topic:
Discovering the Building Blocks of Social Networks
Do people with different academic backgrounds communicate differently? Is the financial sector secretly making our global economy more and more complex? Network analysis combined with relevant data is frequenquently used to answer these types of questions. In this talk, we explore so-called meso-level patterns in socio-economic networks. In particular, we look at what we can learn from network motifs: small microstructures of a handful of nodes and edges that surprisingly frequently occur in the network. We discuss recent advances on methods for discovering these motifs in both multilayer and dynamic networks. With these techniques we are able to answer the aforementioned two questions, unveiling the basic building blocks of the underlying networks and getting a better understanding of the complex interactions taking place.