Program

Arrival at the hotel, self-organized by the attendant.

WELCOME, OPENING & Individual Presentations

9:00 - 10:00

Giuseppe Mangioni (University of Catania, Italy)
Manlio De Domenico (University of Padua, Italy)

Session I: Infrastructure Networks

10:00 - 11:00    PART I

11:00 - 11:30    COFFEE BREAK

11:30 - 13:00    PART II

Marta Gonzalez (UC Berkeley, USA)
My presentation explores predictive models for human mobility in urban systems, emphasizing the critical role of data and mobility metrics in their accuracy. Road usage patterns are analyzed, revealing a few driver sources significantly influencing major traffic flow, enabling a strategy for substantial travel time reduction. Another study identifies traffic collapse as a phase transition with three states and two distinctive transitions, marking the system's breakdown. Percolation theory and the macroscopic fundamental diagram are applied to empirical traffic networks. Another lecture then demonstrates practical applications for sustainable transportation planning, utilizing phone-based travel demand and bike app data. The percolation theory helps prioritize bike paths based on potential demand, exemplified in Bogotá. Finally, I present a framework for facility allocation for the 15-minute city, with results suggesting a 50% reduction in travel costs through optimized facility redistribution. The findings provide a functional model for estimating the number of facilities required to achieve a desired average travel distance based on population distribution in a city.

16:00 - 18:00    STUDENT TALKS

Networks and Data Science
Amina Azaiez
Chen Zhang
Elia Altimani
Esteban Nocet-Binois
Rocco Mattia Di Mauro
Salvatore Romano
Systems Biology and Medicine
Davide Longo

18:30 - 19:30    COCKTAIL NIGHT TALK

Brain networks, yes, but what kind?
Luiz Pessoa  (University of Maryland, USA)
Despite their widespread application across domains, basic network models face key challenges when applied to complex biological systems, particularly in neuroscience. These challenges include the need to account for time-varying connections and adaptive topologies; the difficulty in representing multilevel systems with cross-level interactions; the shortcomings of fixed state spaces for systems that continuously expand their range of possible states; and the need to model deep history dependence and open-world interactions. While some limitations can be addressed through extensions like multilayer networks and time-varying connections, I argue that biological systems exhibit radical context dependence and open-endedness that motivate the continued development of novel mathematical formalization. Using examples primarily from neuroscience, I discuss how even sophisticated approaches incorporating dynamics and context sensitivity fall short in fully capturing biological complexity. Moving forward requires developing frameworks that explicitly account for adaptive reconfiguration, embrace open-ended state spaces, and draw inspiration from concepts like Kauffman's "adjacent possible".

Session II: New Approach to the Biological Basis of Disease and Therapeutics

9:30 - 11:00    PART I

11:00 - 11:30    COFFEE BREAK

11:30 - 12:30    PART II

Joe Loscalzo (Harvard University, USA)
In the modern omic era, we increasingly recognize the complexity of biological systems and the interrelationships that exist among their components. The time- honored strategy of analyzing these systems by focusing on a single element has had limited success. Network medicine is a new discipline that focuses holistically on complex (patho)biological systems, and incorporates principles of network science and systems biology to identify mechanisms of disease and potential treatment strategies. Analyzing these intricate networks requires novel mathematical and computational approaches that continue to evolve and are now beginning to incorporate deep learning and other artificial intelligence-based strategies. In this presentation, I will demonstrate the application of these principles to disease, showing, for example, how all diseases are polygenic and influenced by environmental determinants; how systems context can explain genetic penetrance; and how network structures can guide the selection of potential drug targets and the repurposing of approved drugs for novel uses. These principles and strategies will deepen our understanding of biology and disease and will ultimately promote the successful evolution of precision medicine.

STUDENT TALKS

16:00 - 17:30    PART I

Network Epidemiology
Charley Presigny
Marika Sartore
Ecological Systems
Mattia Mattei
Niek Mooij
Network Foundations
Andrea Filippo Beretta

17:30 - 18:00    COFFEE BREAK

18:00 - 19:00    PART II

Rotem Brand
Social and Urban Systems
Emile Emery
Gregorio Berselli
Tommaso Bertola

08:30 - 13:00    Social tour

Session III: Spatial transmission of infectious diseases

16:00 - 17:30    PART I

17:30 - 18:00    COFFEE BREAK

18:00 - 19:00    PART II

Vittoria Colizza (INSERM & Sorbonne Université, France)
The spatial spread of infectious diseases is shaped by the movement of individuals across a fragmented landscape of local communities. Mobility networks, such as commuting flows and transportation infrastructures, drive these dynamics. Metapopulation models offer a powerful framework to capture this structure and simulate epidemic transmission across space. This lecture will explore their foundations and applications, from mechanistic models to applied public health approaches for epidemic control.

9:30 - 11:00    Focused Seminars I

Modeling Social Behavior on Networks: Contagions, Culture, Rumors, and Cooperation
Jesus Gomez-Gardeñez (UNIZAR, Spain)
Understanding the emergence of collective behaviors in social systems requires integrating models of individual decision-making with the complex backbone of social interactions. In this lecture, we will present a synthetic overview of network-based models aimed at capturing the dynamics of social behavior. We begin by introducing the framework of compartmental models aimed at capturing complex contagions, emphasizing the role of threshold models and reinforcement mechanisms in the adoption of behaviors requiring social validation. This will be contrasted with models of rumor and information spreading, which are typically governed by simple contagion processes and characterized by different microscopic. We then discuss models for cultural dissemination, highlighting how the interplay between homophily and social influence on structured populations gives rise to cultural diversity and polarization. Special attention will be paid to the effects of network topology and the presence of noise or mass media. Finally, we will turn our attention to the framework of evolutionary game theory on networks, focusing on cooperation in social dilemmas such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma and Public Goods Game. We will explore how spatial and network reciprocity mechanisms can promote cooperation, and examine the impact of coevolutionary dynamics, such as strategy-topology feedbacks and multi-layer interactions. Overall, this lecture aims at providing the audience  with an integrative perspective on how network science informs our understanding of key social phenomena, bridging the gap between microscopic behavioral rules and emergent macroscopic patterns.

11:00 - 11:30    COFFEE BREAK

11:30 - 13:00    Focused Seminars II

Network Inference
Marta Sales (URV, Spain)

Abstract

16:00 - 17:30    Focused Seminars III

Food connections: shock propagation along the agricultural trade network
Stefano Schiavo (UNITN, Italy)
The talk will focus on the globalization of agriculture and the contribution of international trade in food security. While trade allows countries to decouple food consumption from the availability of natural resources  and promotes a more efficient use of endowments, global connectivity may facilitate the transmission of shocks and make countries vulnerable to disturbances originating abroad. Using a simple model of shock propagation along the international trade network, and some scenarios that account for climate and/or policy events, the talk will illustrate the role played by connectivity in determining countries' exposure to external disturbances and discuss possible mechanisms to reduce their negative effects.

17:30 - 18:00    COFFEE BREAK

18:00 - 19:00    PROJECTS TIME

20:00 - 23:00    SOCIAL DINNER

9:30 - 11:00    Focused Seminars IV

Using Signed Networks to Understand Complex Social Systems
Sofia Teixeira (NEU, UK)
Signed relationships — expressions of friendship, trust, conflict, or tension — are a crucial but often overlooked feature of social systems. In this talk, I will explore how incorporating signed networks into Computational Social Science can help us better understand the complexity and nuance of human interactions, both online and offline. I will introduce a computational lens to study social tensions, cohesion, and the temporal evolution of social dynamics. We will examine how theories from social psychology, combined with the signs of social ties — positive and negative — enrich our ability to model and understand the mechanisms behind phenomena such as polarization, emotional balance, and social stability.

11:00 - 11:30    COFFEE BREAK

11:30 - 13:00    Focused Seminars V

Networks in the city
Marc Barthelemy (CEA/CNRS, France)
At the core of cities lie complex networks that support their functioning, growth, and resilience. This seminar explores the structure and evolution of networks central to urban systems. As these networks are embedded in geographic space, they are naturally spatial networks, shaped by physical constraints and topographical features. We will focus primarily on transportation networks, such as street networks and subway systems, examining their organization, historical development, and modeling using tools from network science. Key structural properties—such as degree distributions, centrality measures, and others—will be introduced and compared to those of non-spatial networks, highlighting the distinctive features of urban infrastructure and the need for tailored metrics. We will also emphasize the need for specific models capable of explaining and reproducing the particular properties of these networks. Beyond traditional 2D representations, we will explore the emerging concept of surfacic networks, which incorporate elevation and topographical data into the analysis. This approach is particularly relevant in cities with varied terrain, where slope and elevation significantly influence accessibility, mobility costs, and infrastructure design. Throughout the lecture, we will present a variety of quantitative tools and models, drawing on empirical examples from real-world cities. The aim is to present a set of conceptual and analytical approaches that are applicable across disciplines—from urban studies and geography to engineering, complex systems, and data science.

16:00 - 17:30    PROJECTS PRESENTATION

17:30 - 18:00    COFFEE BREAK

18:00 - 19:00    AWARD & CLOSING CERIMONIES