Slides of the ICWSM Gephi tutorial

Sébastien Heymann and Julian Bilcke gave yesterday the official Gephi tutorial at the ICWSM conference, in Barcelona. The International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media is a unique forum that brings together researchers from the disciplines in computer science, linguistics, communication, and the social sciences. The broad goal of ICWSM is to increase understanding of social media in all its incarnations. This is also a special conference for us because we introduced Gephi for the first time 2 years ago, at the 3rd ICWSM conference.

Thought the tutorial was not recorded, you’ll find here the slides of the tutorial.

SP1: Exploratory Network Analysis with Gephi

This month about 80 people were trained to Gephi thanks to the fundings we receive at our non-profit organization, the Gephi Consortium: 40 people at ICWSM, but also 20 people at UKSNA and 20 people at the French Complex System summer school. We will have our next talk at ECCS, the European Conference on Complex Systems. Looking forward to see you there!

Gephi Tutorials at UKSNA and ICWSM 2011

We are very excited to announce that the Gephi Team has a tutorial session at both UKSNA and ICWSM conferences this summer!

UKSNA will be located at the University of Greenwich, London. The Gephi Short Course is on Wednesday, 6 July (2:30 – 6:30PM).
The UK Social Networks Conference offers an interdisciplinary venue for social and behavioral scientists, sociologists, educationalists, political scientists, mathematicians, computer scientists, physicists, practitioners and others to present their work in the area of social networks. The primary objective of the conference is to facilitate interactions between the many different disciplines interested in network analysis.
website | registration | Facebook event

ICWSM Tutorial Day will be held July 17, 2011 (1:00 – 4:00 PM) in Barcelona, Spain.
The International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media is a unique forum that brings together researchers from the disciplines in computer science, linguistics, communication, and the social sciences. The broad goal of ICWSM is to increase understanding of social media in all its incarnations.
website | registration | Facebook event

Registration to these events is still open! The tutorial at ICWSM costs $150 ($100 for students). The tutorial at UKSNA costs £100 (£50 for students).

Program:

In these tutorials, Sébastien Heymann and Julian Bilcke will provide a hands-on demonstration of the essential functionalities of Gephi, based on a real case scenario. The participants will be guided step by step through the complete chain of representation, manipulation, layout, analysis and aesthetics refinements. Particular focus will be put on filters and metrics for the creation of their first visualizations. They will be incited to compare the hypotheses suggested by their own explorations. They finally will walk away with the practical knowledge enabling them to use Gephi for their own projects. The tutorial is intended for professionals, researchers and graduates who wish to learn how playing during a network exploration can speed up their studies.

Requirements:

Participants should come with their own laptop (and a mouse!) with Gephi installed. After the guided introduction, they will have time to work on a dataset of their own and receive help and direct feedback from the teaching team.

It is also a great opportunity to meet researchers and practitioners interested in network visualization, looking forward speaking with you all there!

Gephi Poster at Sunbelt, Longitudinal Networks, Plug-ins and Future

The Sunbelt Conference went extremely well, with great audience for Gephi and many positive feedbacks and comments. This event confirmed Gephi is fulfilling some of the essential needs and is going toward the good direction. Two of our plans are to improve features for longitudinal networks and develop the gephi-toolkit. Let’s see what we learnt from Sunbelt.

Download Gephi Poster

The Sunbelt Conference is a huge event, and this edition breaks all records with more than 700 participants and a very intensive program. Needless to say outstanding researches are presented there and it’s a pleasure to meet everyone, though we didn’t have enough time there in Riva Del Garda (Italy).

Longitudinal Networks

A great majority of people we provided a Gephi demo asked about dynamic network support. That is not really surprising but it shows the great demand about these features and the interest the timeline in Gephi and how to use it.

I was however frustrated we didn’t have the time to go deeper in the discussion. People are looking for specific layout, evolution and diffusion features. It is a vast topic and that’s why we are starting a draft specification about longitudinal networks. Our aim is to collect knowledge, references and feature requests from Sunbelt researchers interested in seeing progress in this direction. That will help for Gephi future versions 0.8 and 0.9.

And it is clear we need a tutorial how to format data to use dynamic features in current version.

Plug-ins, Toolkit, reuse and mashup

Gephi is a modular application extensible with plug-ins. We hope that the existing documentation is enough to already start to code cool stuff and are really eager to help anyone who has a plugin project. Meet us on the forum.

Gephi also relies on a dozen core modules that can be packaged independently. That is what we call the gephi-toolkit, which official announcement and tutorial are due soon. Many researchers are seduced by this idea, allowing custom scripting and command-line applications using Gephi features. Stay tuned.

Future

Gephi is an international project, open to any institution or company anxious to see quick progress. We are looking for contributors and funding. Please contact us. Thanks to Google Summer of Code program, see what we can do in four months with great students.

Stay tuned on twitter

Meet Gephi at 30th Sunbelt Conference, June 29 to July 04

We are very excited to annouce the Gephi Team is attending the International Sunbelt Social Network Conference, located in Riva del Garda, Italy from June 29 to July 04. We present a poster and will provide software demonstration on Friday, 2 during Poster Session (12:30-13:30)

The Sunbelt conference is the hugest event in the area of Social Network and we are honored to present our project there. More than 700 abstracts are to be presented there, by social scientists, mathematicians, computer scientists, ethnologists, and more… The program is very rich and interdisciplinary and will for sure fulfill our curiosity.

It’s also the best opportunity to meet researchers and practitioners interested in network visualization, looking forward speaking with you all there!

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Gephi at Eurovis 2010, Bordeaux

The Gephi Team presents a poster for the Eurovis 2010 conference, June 9-11, located in Bordeaux, France.

EuroVis 2010 is the 12th annual Visualization Symposium jointly organized by the Eurographics Working Group on Data Visualization and the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee.

The poster will be presented by Sebastien Heymann and Mathieu Jacomy on site during the poster session. They will also provide live demo.

It is a great opportunity to present some of the visualization features available in Gephi and discuss with the research community about the project and network visualization in general. The poster concentrates on the visualization topic and a general project presentation. It describes the visualization architecture built for the OpenGL and Preview engine. Abstract Using Computer Games Techniques for Improving Graph Viz Efficiency Gephi is a modular and extensible open-source network visualization platform. It follows a pragmatic approach for visualization by using two different engines for two different purposes. Large scale graph drawing requires performance and interactivity, but also customization and implementation flexibility. We observed that fulfilling all aspects in a single rendering engine is technically not viable on a long-term view and propose to use different technologies. Gephi project aims to create a sustainable software and technical ecosystem, driven by a large international open-source community, who shares common interests in networks and complex systems. It focuses on visualization and manipulation, simplicity and extensibility. Full Abstract (2 pages)

Future Internet and Society: A Complex Systems Perspective

The European Science Foundation (ESF), in partnership with COST is organising the following conference:

Future Internet and Society: A Complex Systems Perspective

Hotel Villa del Mare, Acquafredda di Maratea, Italy
2-7 October 2010

Chair: Romualdo Pastor-Satorras – Departament de Física i Enginyeria Nuclear (FIB), Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, ES
Co-Chair: Claudio Castellano – CNR-ISC (Istituto dei Sistemi Complessi) and Dipartimento di Fisica, Sapienza Universitá di Roma, IT

The digital revolution and the advent of the Internet are transforming the way we work, how we spend our free time. These phenomena are also changing how we communicate with each other and the way in which we establish and maintain our social relations. The relationship between Internet and society is complex and bidirectional, leading to a co-evolution of the two systems. In fact, the Internet exists because humans need networking and the Internet evolution is ultimately driven by our ever-increasing use of it.

Back from ICWSM

We are just back from California where we presented a demo paper at ICWSM’09 conference.

I was impressed at many levels, especially how professional where presentations. More than 47% of papers where done by students, I think this is great. The poster and demo session was highly appreciated by everyone and I think showed the diversity and creativity of students. Pr Jon Kleinberg’s talk was very impressive, notably by its clarity. Network structure and diffusion in one of the topic we like to follow and read about here. We also highly appreciate Pr Watts’s presence for his experience

Experts will be more likely to drive conclusions and highlights about the conference than me. Note that the KDD’09 (Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Conference) in Paris sounds very interesting as well, with connate topics.

Demo was a success, as we received many audience and comments. We tied numerous links to the network and social media research community. As Gephi is open-source, needless to say we count on international support and collaboration to build a better tool. Effort is made to be compatible with other file format but more must be done to help users to work with network data more easily. I think we are doing well, as 0.7 version will be based on a modular framework.

Well, very positive. Rendezvous next year.