Today the IU Network Science Institute and the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University are pleased to announce AccelNet-MultiNet, a new collaboration to strengthen and expand the international community of network science researchers working in the area of multilayer networks.
The project, funded by the National Science Foundation, heavily integrates four European partner organizations: Universitat de Barcelona (Spain), ISI Foundation (Italy), Central European University (Hungary, Austria), and Centre de Physique Théorique (France).
IUNI Director Santo Fortunato is the IU principal investigator, along with co-principal investigator Ann McCranie, IUNI’s assistant director of research administration. Leading from Northeastern are Alessandro Vespignani and Kate Coronges.
A centerpiece of this five-year project is building international exchanges between scholars in the U.S. and Europe who are working in the area of multilayer network science. We are accomplishing this by funding 40 graduate and post-doctoral fellow exchanges between labs and institutes to work on cutting edge science that spans the two groups. Essentially, we are asking these young scholars to become brokers between two communities. Built into the exchange and fellowship program is training in international collaborations, network science, and “collabathon”activities that result in publication and presentations.
AccelNet-MultiNet will also create a new international webinar series in Fall 2020 that will feature leading scholars talking about their newest research. This monthly series will be intertwined with our shared collaborations but will also be publicly available and archived. We hope this series is appealing to the many researchers interested in these problems and creates a form of virtual water-cooler, where new and exciting work doesn’t have to wait for the next annual conference to get a wide airing.
Finally, NSF-funding will allow us to organize three international summits on multilayer network science that we hope will set the agenda and create solutions for some of the pressing methodologically- and application-based inquiries in this field. These meetings will take place in the U.S. and Europe.
If you are interested in following our work, you are welcome to follow us on Twitter and sign up for periodic newsletter updates on announcements related to the project.
Read more about this project: IU release and Northeastern release.
View the AccelNet-MultiNet website here: https://www.accelnet-multinet.org/
AccelNet-MultiNet is funded by NSF grants 1927418 and 1927425.