My new book! Written w my pal Alex Townsend, it's about the math behind enormous systems (medical scans, AI, etc.) and what happens when they outgrow our ability to understand them. Pre-order at @barnesandnoble.com for 25% off -> www.barnesandnoble.com/w/big-math-s... @littlebrown.bsky.social

At the end of the term I asked my college creative wriing students to submit anonymous thoughts on AI. No real surprises: Mood ranges from resignation to despair, capitulation from embittered erosion of standards to total, feelings of betrayal from deep to furious. 1/

Now with a nice "Editors' Suggestion" badge! We have some further rigorous results (i.e., not approximations) to follow shortly.

A report for university chancellors and presidents concerned about the state of academic scholarship: Statistical thinking is postmodern.

Interested in network science, evolutionary biology, and animal behavior? I am seeking a PhD student to join the Quantitative Network Science group at the Department of Mathematical Modeling and Machine Learning of the University of Zurich. Info and application here: jobs.uzh.ch/job-vacancie...

I didnt know there were such dreams to live as a child!

We wrote a perspective piece on future directions & challenges for stochastic thermodynamics. Great collaboration with Jan Korbel, Sarah Loos, Gonzalo Manzano, Rosalba Garcia-Millan, Olga Movilla Miangolarra, Edgar Roldan arxiv.org/abs/2604.26601

Claude does not seem able to reliably answer: "how many cathedrals does the Church of England have?" What a weird blind spot.

Next week, my course on Networks and Complexity is starting again, which is always taught online. We have some space left for international students. Lectures will be on mondays and thursdays 16:00-18:00 CEST. Starting 9th. 24 Lectures total. More info in the reply.

Journal publishing is bad now, but …this year is the 40th anniversary of my first published paper and the 43rd anniversary of it being accepted for publication.

Can't get over the fact that in the ML literature the act of *sampling* from an inferred model is now called “inference.” We really are in the worst timeline.

We are looking for a PhD student to work with us on network science methods for biomedicine. The student can be enrolled in any graduate program. #NetworkMedicine #ComplexSystems.

I wrote a blog post about the often stated but never explained assumption that communities in graphs should always be connected. This is inconsistent with statistical significance and null models that underlie the most widely employed methods. skewed.de/lab/posts/co...

A principled graph embedding that also appears to work well in practice: arxiv.org/abs/2512.02694

Our review on multilayer network science is out on the arXiv. Thanks to all collaborators of the AccelNet MultiNet project, great working with you all 🙏 @alexvespi.bsky.social @ymoreno.bsky.social @lordgrilo.bsky.social @anduviera.bsky.social @baronca.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2511.23371

Very good post. I very much agree with the overall position.

Excited to introduce Vibes from Meta. Eat your slop, piggies!

Message passing for epidemiological interventions on networks with loops https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21596

Our fall seminar series begins this Thursday, Oct. 2 (4pm UTC+1/11am EDT) with a talk by Elena Candellone. She’ll be speaking about “Mapping extreme users through negative ties in online social interactions”, followed by a discussion on “the joy of planning scientific events”.

arXiv alert! 📄🚨 Robustness of small networks arxiv.org/abs/2509.23670 Great to dust off one of my favorite topics and get to collaborate with the legendary @aliceschwarze.bsky.social and Peter Mucha

#SpreadtheWord We are looking for #PhD candidates passionate about using large-scale data analysis, quantitative models, and complexity science to study the complex interactions within #epidemiology, #OneHealth, and #publichealthsystems. More info: csh.ac.at/education/gr...

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 [email protected]

We found a nice way to accurately solve the SIS model. Rather than expanding in space with ever larger moment closures (pairs, triples, ...), we expand in time. No more difficult than pair-approximations yet much more accurate. arxiv.org/abs/2509.11706

Strong emergence

Postdoc job! I expect to have an opening at Johns Hopkins for a postdoctoral researcher working somewhere in the broad realms of physics, philosophy, and complexity. Apply at Academic Jobs Online: academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/30496

Not sure how many scientists here have tried Claude Code or similar command line coding assistants. I had a complicated family property tax problem that was best solved by a brute force Monte Carlo simulation approach, so I spent a few days coding up and analyzing a model with Claude Code.

Applications are open for SFI's 2026 Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships If you’ve recently earned a Ph.D. in any scientific field and want to pursue independent, transdisciplinary research, consider applying. Deadline: October 1, 2025 Apply here: santafe.edu/sfifellowship

beautiful location for statphys

My talk from @bioctrl.bsky.social about the physical origin of agency is uploaded here: youtube.com/watch?v=YY21... TLDR: noise equals control. Nature is constantly sampling control trajectories via noise

New group name! We are now the "probabilistic systems, information and inference" aka Ψ²

The Kac formula says the average return time for a random walker is a wonderfully simple combination of global and local structure: 2m/k_i. Inspired by this result we characterize the full distribution in a similar manner. doi.org/10.1103/Phys...

Approximation for return time distributions of random walks on sparse networks link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/...

The quiet before the storm. Good morning #NetSci2025

A reader of Free Agents sent me this lovely poem by Jared Anderson... 😊

Funded PhD position available in my group: international applications welcome! Looking for a student interested in complex systems, dynamics and applications to complex neural systems to join our group in the School of Physics at Sydney University. Details here: www.sydney.edu.au/scholarships...

Choose Science. Choose Europe. A new Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowships 2025 call is now open. With a budget of €404.3 million, it will support around 1,650 researchers from Europe and beyond. Apply by 10 September → europa.eu/!fBTMgF

🚀 Now accepting applications for the new MS in Complex Network Analysis at Northeastern! Study real-world systems—social, financial, biological, public health—using cutting-edge network science tools. 🌐 Info: shorturl.at/bKUZV 📅 Live Webinars (starting April-May): shorturl.at/xrory

🚀 Dive into Network Science at Utrecht University's Summer School (July 7-11, 2025)! Learn how networks shape our social, economic & biological worlds. Hands-on training with Python & R by leading experts. Register now! 🌐 net-science.github.io/%F0%9F%94%97 #NetworkScience

Sevilla

I just heard that a cryptography professor at Indiana University had his house raided and was fired. Don’t know much more. www.heraldtimesonline.com/story/news/l...

at least they didn't Telegram

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

Just a few days until the next NetSci colloquium with the brilliant Petra Vértes. Sign up here: iu.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

📢 𝗖𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗟𝗮𝘁𝗲-𝗕𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗸 – 𝗡𝗲𝘁𝗦𝗰𝗶 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟱 📢 We are excited to announce 𝗮 𝘀𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗱 𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗮𝗯𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁𝘀 for the NetSci Conference! netsci2025.github.io/calls/

How #SCOTUS #SupremeCourt makes decisions is on many minds today. Many #voting models eschew interactions by considering votes as just expressions of individual/ideological preferences. We show interactions matter for #SCOTUS #SupremeCourt voting. doi.org/10.1098/rsta... 🧪

I shared a controversial take the other day at an event and I decided to write it down in a longer format: I’m afraid AI won't give us a "compressed 21st century" Here: thomwolf.io/blog/scienti... It's an extension of this interview discussion from the AI summit: youtu.be/AxBd3G0lFLs?...

🚨 New job alert! 🚨 Come join me at the BBC to find stories using satellite data! This is a remote sensing scientist job applied to news, where you'll use machine learning and build tools to analyse satellite imagery for our in-house investigations. Happy to chat or answer any questions!

We are glad to present 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞𝐱𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐍𝐞𝐭𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤𝐬 𝐂𝐎𝐦𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐑𝐄𝐬𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐜𝐞𝐬 (𝐂𝐎𝐑𝐄) 🎉 complexity-core.github.io 𝐂𝐎𝐑𝐄 is a newly-created umbrella organization that aims to gather resources and initiatives directed to the Complexity and Network Science community.

faculty job in machine learning, deadline March 16: www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/49361/

Missed the NetSci deadline? No problem! Submit your work to the SINM Satellite at NetSci 2025! We have an amazing lineup of speakers so far, including Michael Schaub, Vince Lyzinski, and @gcant.bsky.social. Revised deadline is Feb 20. See sinm.network for details.