2014 AMS "Mathematics Research Community" on Network Science

I am organizing, jointly with Aaron Clauset and David Kempe (and with help from Dan Larremore), an AMS Mathematics Research Community on Network Science. It will take place 24-30 June 2014 in Snowbird, Utah, USA.

Online applications will be available starting 1 November. Please drop us a line if you have any questions.

Oxford Workshop (July 2013) on Time-Dependent Networks

On 8-9 July 2013, we're having a workshop on time-dependent and multiplex networks at University of Oxford. We're holding this in the Mathematical Institute and are funded by EPSRC. I am organizing this workshop in collaboration with Sang Hoon Lee.

Quote of the Day (Live blogging)

"I'm not being paid to think. I am paid to lecture." (Edriss Titi, currently lecturing, answering a question regarding whether he thinks a certain conjecture is true)

The question, "Do you think the conjecture is true?" came from Jonathan Mattingly.

Real-time research and other workshop shenanigans

My current conference has a ton of people I have met before---possibly close to 50% of the people there. I have not had a chance to talk to a good number of the people I know. (By the way, I was told by one of the workshop organizers without asking that the reason I didn't get funding to come was that because I'm in CA, they knew it would be pretty cheap for me, and they figured I'd come anyway if they didn't fund me. Clearly, they PS12ed the situation rather successfully...) There are also others I recognize because I've seen them speak before. Another person came up to me from having seen me at multiple previous conferences but never having met me. Several people have come up to me to congratulate me on my job, others came up to me because they saw my application and recognized my name (or were specifically told about me), and one person I know even came up to me to indicate he looked for my application but didn't find it (their advertisement came out after I got the offer from Oxford, so I was going to apply but never did). It's also gratifying that there are several people who have been looking out for me and want to help me. So, this workshop could have been quite the whorefest for me. As it stands, it's been good for the ego, which is much appreciated given my recent mood. (More people are aware of my work now as well, so hopefully that trend will continue. Of course, this conference does consist predominantly of people in my primary area, so this isn't exactly a random group of people.)

Thankfully, however, I have a job waiting for me, so I have been able to concentrate on research for a while instead of job applications. This is obviously much preferable!

OK, so what about the title of this entry... One of the reasons I came is that one of my main collaborators is here and discussing things in person for various projects would be extremely helpful. Indeed, it has been. The M.O. has been to meet about various things, e-mail questions to our collaborators during the talks, and then go through the responses together during various breaks from the talks. Rinse, wash, repeat. Several things have advanced considerably as a result and I actually wouldn't be too surprised if we can start writing one of them up in a couple weeks. (And this is one that should have an awesome chance to get into PRL.) Being in the same place speeds up progress immensely.

Live MathBlogging

Here's a brief comment.

I just saw something in a seminar that I've never seen before.

The medium for the present talk is an overhead projector. The speaker was presenting a brief example but didn't have a good picture to show people. He was struggling with describing what the system is, so the next speaker (sitting in the front row) handed him a slide of that to borrow and show. (The next speaker is going into more detail on that topic.)

You gotta' love mathematical relief pitching...

What happens in Berkeley stays in Berkeley

Tomorrow I am flying to Berkeley for an MSRI workshop on dynamical systems, where I will be seeing famous people talk, networking with people I already know, giving a pseudo-Lebowitzian five-minute talk, and hammering out some things with one of my collaborators.

I'll be crashing with Gazebo, which he must be really eagerly anticipating at the moment given how grumpy I've been for the last week or so. As I found out at dinner today, some of my friends have been avoiding me lately (or at least not actively seeking me out), and I can't say that I blame them. I certainly haven't been my usual cheerful self lately.

Of course, I am currently dealing with a confluence of several things---my right foot (I hope somebody caught this allusion) and related things, food poisoning or stomach flu (and the only other person who got this from something at Interhouse was having lunch with me, so I can't decide between the two other than to speculate that the stomach flu would have lasted longer), projects whose components are taking longer to work than I was hoping, multiple collaborators on these projects who are applying pressure for these things to work (above and beyond the pressure that I apply to myself) and for me to give preference to my project with them, recruiting SURF students (though that's more of something that has been taking time away from catching up on work rather than something that directly causes stress... I have gotten some really good students, about whom I will brag more later), dealing with occasional annoyances in the work environment (that I am reacting to worse than I otherwise might because of my prevaling mood, so this whole business is cascading), and a bump in the road for my book (for which I am currently reading copy-edited versions of the text and compiling a list of changes, which mostly includes lots of things that need to be put back the way they were before...err, duplicating work I've already done multiple times). And, of course, my interactions related to the speedbump with the book have been helped by my mood. (There are lots of recent rants in my 'sent mail' folder...)

It's not that any one of these things is horrible or that they won't get resolved because I can already see how many of them will be resolved. (For instance, with the book, I know that some discussions and time investment will solve the problem, but I may well have to invest time I was going to use for catching up on work to make sure that we get this book out by this May, which we are really pushing to do.) Writing a book is really stressful.

Despite all this, I did have isolated moments of being social in the past week. And then I've just been really grumpy when around my friends. (I think apologies should go out to Lemming especially, as he has taken far more shit from me than he should have this past week.)

I suppose I should also include something positive in this entry. First, there was something really awesome at Robin's tonight, though I'll wait for Lemming to make his post and just link to that. Second, I was talking to an undergrad I know from ping pong last week (this would be the other person who got food poisoning) and apparently the fact that I actually care about undergrads really shines through. So at least I'm doing something right. It's always nice to hear things like that, especially during periods of time when I'm not having a fun time.

So, AG gets to host me at just the right time.

(By the way, I'm hoping that getting things off my chest with this blog entry will make me rant just a little bit less when I am interacting with people offline.)