Successful second edition of the Complex Networks Winter Workshop (CNWW19)

The second edition of the Complex Networks Winter Workshop (CNWW19) was held at the Monastère des Augustines in Québec on December 15-20, 2019.

Organized jointly by the Vermont Complex Systems Center (Juniper Lovato, Laurent Hébert-Dufresne), Sentinelle Nord (Marie-France Gévry) and Dynamica (Antoine Allard), CNWW is a week-long international school offering a unique opportunity for participants to engage in rigorous transdisciplinary complexity science research alongside some of the top researchers in the field of networks.

Participants attended lectures on network science (e.g. community detection, dealing with network data, making high quality scientific figures) and on various topics leveraging the tools of network science (stability of ecosystems, on-line activism, sustainable forestry, animal behavior, etc) by leaders of the fields (James P. Bagrow, Dominique Gravel, Élise Filotas, Brooke Foucault Wells, Daniel B. Larremore, Elizabeth Hobson, Peter Sheridan Dodds, Samuel V. Scarpino), as well as two lectures by Vincent Larivière and Cassidy R. Sugimoto about the open-access publications and gender inequalities in science.

Participants and lecturers also worked together on various original projects (hockey fights, social roles in ant colonies, spread of infectious diseases in coral reefs, etc.) and presented their results Friday afternoon. The objective of these projects was to force participants to step outside their comfort zone, and to expose them to a new intensive (and fun) way of doing science.

This year again, the quality of the projects was outstanding.

Social activites were scheduled on most nights, allowing participants and faculty to create bonds which will hopefully last well beyond the duration of the workshop.

Dynamica’s own Béatrice Désy and Vincent Thibeault were among the participants, and Guillaume St-Onge and Charles Murphy, who attended last year’s edition of CNWW, returned as project liaisons.