Alec Kirkley
captainkirk1041.bsky.social
Alec Kirkley
@captainkirk1041.bsky.social
Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong. Interested in statistical physics, networks, complex systems, and cities. Webpage: https://aleckirkley.com/
Reposted by Alec Kirkley
Double feature, just out on @royalsocietypublishing.org:

"Uncertainty quantification and posterior sampling for network reconstruction"

Previous explainer thread here: bsky.app/profile/tiag...

Code here: graph-tool.skewed.de/static/docs/...

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
November 5, 2025 at 8:15 AM
Reposted by Alec Kirkley
Just out on @royalsocietypublishing.org:

"Scalable network reconstruction in subquadratic time"

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Previous explainer thread here: bsky.app/profile/tiag...

Code here: graph-tool.skewed.de/static/docs/...
November 5, 2025 at 8:11 AM
Reposted by Alec Kirkley
🚀 The University of Rochester is hiring in Complex Systems (Physics)!
Join a vibrant cross-disciplinary cluster supported by the Simons Foundation.
Great opportunity to build a program at the interface of physics, biology & cognition.
Apply ➡️ apply.interfolio.com/173432
Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio
apply.interfolio.com
October 12, 2025 at 3:29 PM
Reposted by Alec Kirkley
I believe science is much more like art than many scientists are willing to consider. I have a feeling that it would free us to do better science if we embraced this view. I may be mistaken but that's where I am mentally.
October 9, 2025 at 3:14 PM
Reposted by Alec Kirkley
Message passing for epidemiological interventions on networks with loops
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21596
September 29, 2025 at 3:34 PM
Reposted by Alec Kirkley
The Probabilistic Systems, Information, and Inference group at the University of Cambridge is seeking applicants for funded PhD positions.

Anyone who wants to study networks/complex systems/statistical physics/inference can email me at gtc31@cam.ac.uk
September 18, 2025 at 3:33 PM
Reposted by Alec Kirkley
Phys. Rev. X: Fast Nonparametric Inference of Network Backbones for Weighted Graph Sparsification
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/4pg6-mtmt
July 18, 2025 at 1:03 PM
Excited to see this out! If you need to identify a network backbone but don’t know how to choose the number of edges to keep, here’s a Bayesian solution.
July 14, 2025 at 12:50 PM
Reposted by Alec Kirkley
types of network science papers
November 19, 2024 at 11:51 PM
Reposted by Alec Kirkley
Are you a #postdoc in the US looking to next steps?

The Austrian Academy of Sciences is opening up 25 fellowships: www.oeaw.ac.at/en/news/25-n...

A great reason to use our visitor program at #Complexity #Science Hub @csh.ac.at and see how you would fit in: csh.ac.at/engage/resea... 🧪🦋
25 new scholarships for US researchers
Fonds Zukunft Österreich (FZÖ) is providing €10 million in funding for an academy program to bring postdocs from the USA to Austria ++ Faßmann: “The right signal in these turbulent times”
www.oeaw.ac.at
June 29, 2025 at 12:00 PM
Reposted by Alec Kirkley
Are you from the US and would like to work as a postdoc in Austria, maybe in our lab? 25 new fellowships will be available in July from the @oeaw.bsky.social: www.oeaw.ac.at/en/news/25-n...

If you are interested; get in touch!
25 new scholarships for US researchers
Fonds Zukunft Österreich (FZÖ) is providing €10 million in funding for an academy program to bring postdocs from the USA to Austria ++ Faßmann: “The right signal in these turbulent times”
www.oeaw.ac.at
June 29, 2025 at 1:28 PM
Reposted by Alec Kirkley
Nowadays, saying your lab is not doing AI (for something, or applied to something) is a revolutionary act.

#ComplexSystems
June 18, 2025 at 12:24 PM
Starting the SINM satellite at @netsciconf.bsky.social with an exciting talk by Daichi Kuroda!
June 3, 2025 at 6:51 AM
Reposted by Alec Kirkley
And the code is live here: github.com/DynamicaLab/...

With @allard.bsky.social and the never-online Simon Lizotte (but you can find him at siliz4.github.io)
May 19, 2025 at 11:38 PM
Reposted by Alec Kirkley
The Network Science Society has a new class of Fellows! Congratulations to the 2025 awardees:

Francesco Bullo
Guanrong Chen
Hawoong Jeong
János Kertész
Renaud Lambiotte
Philippa E. Pattison
Mason A. Porter
Eckehard Schöll
Sara A. Solla
May 6, 2025 at 2:22 PM
Reposted by Alec Kirkley
The 2025 Euler Award in Network Science goes to Ginestra Bianconi! @gin-bianconi.bsky.social 👏
May 6, 2025 at 2:26 PM
Reposted by Alec Kirkley
The Erdős-Rényi Prize in Network Science is awarded to Federico Battiston! ⭐
May 6, 2025 at 2:29 PM
Reposted by Alec Kirkley
a thing I’ve noticed in my time in research: many people really want to believe that Data™ is some sort of magical object that contains objective truth

but the thing is, just like everything else, data is _produced_ via processes and mechanisms that profoundly affect the shape of the data
True story: Sometimes when people talk to me about “synthetic data” i just scream “WHERE DO THE BITS OF INFORMATION COME FROM” at them
May 5, 2025 at 7:51 PM
Reposted by Alec Kirkley
Finally, the preprint+Python package "neatnet" is out: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.16198
https://github.com/uscuni/neatnet

If you are working with street/planar/spatial networks, this will solve *so* many problems! Many of my projects had this bottleneck - […]

[Original post on datasci.social]
April 28, 2025 at 7:37 AM
I've been guest editing a focus issue for Journal of Physics: Complexity with @jgyou.bsky.social, @gcant.bsky.social, and Cate De Bacco on Statistical Inference and Machine Learning for Complex Networks. See iopscience.iop.org/collections/..., and feel free to get in touch with any questions!
Focus Issue on Statistical Inference and Machine Learning for Complex Networks - IOPscienceSearch
iopscience.iop.org
April 5, 2025 at 3:56 AM
Reposted by Alec Kirkley
Finished reviewing my pile of papers for a premier data mining CS conference today and then read their other reviews. Wow. They are utter garbage: largely superficial, thoughtless, and vague. We should be ashamed to call this #peerreview and inflict this misery on each other and on our trainees 1/2
March 25, 2025 at 8:57 PM
Reposted by Alec Kirkley
🎉 Congrats to Federico Battiston!
Federico, Associate Professor at CEU DNDS & Director of the PhD Program, has won the 2025 Young Scientist Award in Socio- & Econophysics from the German Physical Society! 🏆

Watch the video: youtu.be/cfv0z7m7mus?...
Professor Federico Battiston Receives the 2025 Young Scientist Award in Socio- and Econophysics
YouTube video by Central European University
youtu.be
March 21, 2025 at 12:15 PM
Reposted by Alec Kirkley
Happy that this just came out on PRX:

“Network Reconstruction via the Minimum Description Length Principle”

journals.aps.org/prx/abstract... 1/3
Network Reconstruction via the Minimum Description Length Principle
A new information-theoretic approach to analyzing complex systems uncovers hidden networks by minimizing data complexity, a method that improves accuracy and efficiency.
journals.aps.org
March 21, 2025 at 6:53 AM
Every one of Tiago’s papers is a masterpiece. Give it a read if you work with networks constructed from different types of observations!
🚨 New paper on ArXiv:

“Uncertainty quantification and posterior sampling for network reconstruction”

TL;DR; We present an efficient method to sample the entire ensemble of possible network reconstructions that are compatible with an indirect observation, e.g. a dynamics.

Short thread: 1/N
March 12, 2025 at 12:46 PM