Meetups and Workshops in SF Bay Area

This article tries to give feedbacks on two recent Gephi events in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The Gephi community is expanding and local events are the best way to meet and greet. We fully support any initiative, and are willing to help/sponsor any meetup or workshop you want to organize. Please contact us for more details.

Gephi User Group Meetup #1

This meetup took place in San Francisco, inviting the local Gephi users to gather around a glass and discuss the project. Hosted by Mathieu Bastian, Gephi’s co-founder, around 15 users showed up. The purpose of a Gephi User Group is to help users, but also developers interested in plug-ins development. For us, it is a great way to simply understand how Gephi is used and on what the development should focus in future releases.

The most notable fact is the diversity of the users: academics, hackers, startups, designers, media, data scientists and more. It’s amazing to see in how many domains network data exists and where analyzing them make sense. Supporting all this diverse datasets is also a challenge, and that was a strong endorsement for the plug-in architecture. Another strength of Gephi is its performances. I asked the question “How big are your networks?”. It’s interesting to notice many of Gephi’s users have very large networks, and are pushing the envelop on performances and memory usage in their daily use.

In general, Mathieu received excellent feedback on the software, praising the interactivity, aesthetics and the plug-in architecture. Users also mentioned that the documentation is still sparse and focus should be made on data transformation. Indeed, a major blocker is often to create a network dataset from an Excel file or a database. The Gephi Toolkit attracted a lot of questions as well.

Gephi Workshop in San Francisco

This workshop was thankfully organized by Kris Chen and Elijah Meeks, and hosted by Noisebridge in San Francisco. Part of the Data Visualization Group in Bay Area, this workshop gathered an amazing crowd of more than 50 participants, eager to learn how to use Gephi. Elijah Meeks is a Digital Humanities Specialist at Stanford and one of the most advanced Gephi user. He ran the workshop, walking users through the complete Gephi process, from data import to preview. Mathieu Bastian was also present, helping users.

We hope to make more workshops like this, as it was a great success. Many Thanks to organizers.

The next workshops will be presented by Sébastien Heymann and Julian Bilcke at the UKSNA and ICWSM conferences in July!

Seminar at LIP6 Paris – March 25

I was kindly invited by the complex networks team at LIP6 to present Gephi 0.7 version during their monthly seminar.

The seminar will take place next week, on the 25th of March at LIP6 in Paris. More information here (in French). Entrance is free.

Abstract:

In this practical talk, I will present 0.7 version of Gephi, open-source graph visualization & manipulation software. Gephi possesses a complete set of network visualization and analysis features, proposes major innovations in dynamic and hierarchical graphs and above all is a flexible and extensible architecture for plugins. I will firstly sum up embedded features: Layout, Metrics, Ranking, Filters, Partition, Preview, Clustering, DataLab. Then, I will present and discuss dynamic and hierarchical graphs features and roadmaps while showing live demo. Afterwards, I will outline our approach by presenting the Gephi project, some insights about performance and the various possibilities of using and extending Gephi in the way scientists and engineers can rely on. To conclude I will speak about plugin development and show how to create a plugin in five minutes.