Scientific Computing Laboratory seminar will be held on Friday, 12 February 2016 at 14:00 in the library reading room of the Institute of Physics Belgrade. The talk entitled

"The associative nature of conference participation "

will be given by Jelena Smiljanić (Scientific Computing Laboratory).

Abstract of the talk:
Patterns of scientific publications, collaborations and citations in scientific journals have been extensively studied in last decade while conference attendance patterns remain mostly unexplored from the perspective of statistical physics. In this talk we will study the conference participation at six national and international conferences of different sizes and from different fields of science. The data we gathered contain detailed information about abstracts presented at the conferences for the period of 30 years, which enables us to analyse the total and successive number of participations, as well as the distribution of time lags between two successive participations for each author. All these properties exhibit truncated power-law behavior, regardless of the conference size and degree of specialization. This indicates that the probability for a scientist to re-attend the specific conference is not constant, but rather it depends on the balance between the number of previous participations and non-participations. In order to further investigate the mechanism behind conference attendance patterns, we propose a microscopic stochastic model based on two key ingredients, 2-bin generalized Polya process and random termination time of a career. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we estimate the model parameters and demonstrate that this model, with positive feedback, can successively reproduce the empirically observed results. We will show that an active participation in a conference series at the beggining strengthens the scientists association with that particular conference community and thus increases the probability of future participations. We expect to see similar participation patterns and dynamics in other types of social groups. In general, understanding mechanisms that underlie the repeated participation in the same conference series could have implications in social networks creation and optimization.

Reference:
J. Smiljanić, A. Chatterjee, T. Kauppinen, M. M. Dankulov, "A theoretical model for the associative nature of conference participation", arXiv:1510.08622 (to appear in PLoS One)