Jean-Gabriel Young

The Joint Lab

2022-09-28T00:00:00+00:00

Laurent Hébert-Dufresne (LHD) and I recently joined forces and created the Joint Lab — a collaborative exploration across sciences with models and data. It combines the strength of the Laboratory for Structure and Dynamics, led by LHD, and the Complex Data Laboratory, led by myself. We are a big group of researchers with a like-minded approach to complex systems research and data science. And we now have a shinny new website, created in Gatsby by Edward Laurence! Check it out for a list of our latest publications and artifacts, an overview of our team, and job opportunities.

FOSS award at MSR 2021

2021-05-10T00:00:00+00:00

Our paper “Which contributions count? Analysis of attribution in open source” has won the FOSS award at the 2021 Mining Software Repositories (MSR) conference. The award recognizes papers that show outstanding contributions to the FOSS community. The paper examines the various ways in which people are given credit for their work on Open Source Software, and identifies areas where existing methods of attribution could be improved. This is a huge honor, as it is my first time attending the MSR conference. Many thanks to my awesome collaborators who helped bring this project to life, it truly is a team effort. PS: We also wrote a short op-ed in Nature Computational Sciences a few months back, highlighting some of those problems. Our MSR paper is a continuation of this work.

Tenure track appointment

2021-03-31T00:00:00+00:00

Big news. I will become an assistant professor at the University of Vermont starting this fall! My primary appointment will be with the Department of Mathematics and Statistics with a joint appointment at the Larner College of Medicine, where I will join the modeling team of the Translational Global Infectious Diseases Research Center (TGIR). I’m also staying on the faculty of the Vermont Complex Systems Center to work with all the fine folks over there, as well as on the faculty of the Computer Science department (secondary appointment). Quite a mouthful!

I will be looking to hire soon, so stay tuned.

Joining UVM

2020-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

Overdue announcement: I am joining the University of Vermont as a Research Assistant Professor to help out with the OCEAN initiative, in collaboration with Google Open Source My primary affiliation will be the Department of Computer Science, and I am also joining the Vermont Complex Systems Center. I am looking forward to many awesome projects with the outstanding faculty and students of UVM!

Big review published in Physics Reports

2020-08-27T00:00:00+00:00

Our review of higher-order approaches to network science is finally out as Volume 874 of Physics Reports (freely accessible to all). It is the fruit of an extensive (800+ references) collaborative effort led by Federico Battiston and Giovanni Petri. If you want the TL;DR, Iacopo Iacopini wrote an excellent summary of the review that can be found here Needless to say that the field is teeming with exciting ideas and that it was a treat to survey them and their precursors, going decades back.

PS: We can thank the Complex Systems Summer School at SFI for this project, since three of us met during the 2015 editions.

New Letter in Nature Physics

2020-02-24T00:00:00+00:00

Laurent Hébert-Dufrense, Samuel Scarpino, and I just published a letter where we argue that interacting contagions look like complex contagions. Sune Lehmann wrote a great perspective piece that explains our work and its implication really well. In a nutshell, we show that one can’t use macroscopic patterns to prove that a contagion is “complex” — simpler mechanistic explanations, like interacting simple contagions, give rise to the same patterns. The upshot is that models of complex contagions are much more tractable than the corresponding models of interacting contagions. Hence, our mapping provides a tractable method to fit models of interacting contagion, and a characterization of their complexity. I have made all the code, slides and material available online; see the following link!

Manuscript published in PRX

2020-01-07T00:00:00+00:00

I want to highlight the recent publication of “Phase transition in the recoverability of network history” in the open-access journal Physical Review X. In this paper, we look at how to infer the past state of a statically observed growing network; we also uncover a phase transition for the quality of the recovered history, governed by the strength of a rich-get-richer mechanism. When the degree distribution becomes too skewed, we find evidence that past state reconstruction becomes impossible.

The project has been a long time in the making; the Dynamica Lab started working on this project back in 2016 at a retreat (see a picture of the retreat after the break!). The product of our work first appeared as a preprint in 2018, and has significantly changed since: follow the link to take a look at what it became! Enormous thanks should go to the anonymous reviewers for their input that helped shape the manuscript. Details about where to find code, slides, and supplementary information are listed in my publication page.

PS: We already followed up on this work, together with Georce T. Cantwell at the University of Michigan, and Guillaume St-Onge at the Dynamica Labs. In the “sequel,” we derive an efficient and exact recovery algorithm for the past state of growing trees. By limiting ourselves to this special class of networks, we obtain a significant efficiency improvement on the algorithm used in the PRX paper, which relied on a state-of-the-art but costly sequential Monte-Carlo sampling method. Our manuscript is currently on the arXiv as a preprint.

(Part of) the team at our 2016 retreat.

Upcoming talks

2019-11-25T00:00:00+00:00

I’m going to attend NetSciX 2020 in Tokyo, to present joint work with Mark Newman and George Cantwell. We have developed a method to automatically and efficiently infer the structure of a network from noisy pairwise observations — we will post an accompanying paper at some point in the future. A proceedings in which I appear as a co-author has also been accepted. It is titled “Connected graphs with a given degree sequence: efficient sampling, correlations, community detection and robustness”, and it is joint work with John Ring and Laurent Hébert-Dufresne. Come and see us!

NetSci 2019

2019-05-09T00:00:00+00:00

I will give a few presentations at NetSci 2019 and at the surrounding events. First, I’ve been asked to kick off the SYNS 2019 Pre-Conference Event “I’d like to learn from…” with an overview of Universality of the SBM. This will be a fun laid-back event on Sunday right before the satellites. I’ll then give a flash talk at SINM 2019, in which I’ll present exciting new work on epidemiology that I’ve been doing with Laurent Hébert-Dufresne and Samuel Scarpino. I’ll close out the week with a talk on Friday at the main event, where I’ll discuss of “Compression of treelike complex networks using layered configuration models” (joint work with Antoine Allard and Laurent Hébert-Dufresne). Mark Newman will also touch on some work we’ve done together, in his SINM contributed talk.

Open NetSci Hackathon

2019-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

I will be co-chairing the first Open NetSci Hackathon with Alice Patania. Our goal is to hold a fun, laid back warm-up event before the flagship NetSci conference. We’re already two months out and hope to see you all there. The line-up of experts is beyond amazing.