Participants of our Research Group at Sunbelt'18

Members of our Research Group presented their projects at Sunbelt 2018 conference which was held in Utrecht, the Netherlands from June 26 to July 1. It is a leading conference devoted to Social Network Analysis which started its history in 1981. This year, it was attended by more than 600 people who are interested in the implementation of SNA in the diverse scientific fields such as sociology, mathematics, anthropology, epidemiology, etc.

Research Group members presented two oral presentations and three posters during the Sunbelt'18 conference. The major part of these projects was done under the supervision of Ilya Musabirov. Anastasiya Kuznetsova who analyses bibliographical profiles within the Research Group gave a speech on “Russian Universities in Citation and Media Networks. The case of Northwestern Region”, Vsevolod Suschevskiy and Ekaterina Marchenko who study transfers in Dota 2 presented the poster “Network Analysis of Players Transfers in eSports. The case of Dota 2”. Alina Bakhitova told about code-sharing within Data Science minor during the poster session with the project “Who do you share your code with? Network analysis of students' collaboration in the blended learning course”, and Anastasiya Menshikova spoke about network structure of Stack Overflow “Network Structure of IT Market expertise: the Case of Stack Overflow”. Some of these projects were made in collaboration with the Laboratory of Science and Education.

For some of our members, Sunbelt was the first international conference. That is why they were full of emotions and impressions. Ekaterina Marchenko and Anastasiia Menshikova shares theirs:

 

 Taking part in such scientific event as Sunbelt conference was a bit scary and extremely exciting because I had had to present a work of us — me and my colleagues — and to communicate with other people (a nightmare for the introvert). However, everything was great!
During our stay in Utrecht, I talked to different people, listened to the speeches of researches, and, of course, presented work made by Ilya Musabirov, Vsevolod Suscheskiy, and me. The poster session is organized in such a way that you stand next to your project and tell its details to the interested people. Before the session had started, I was quite nervous because our poster was from the works of the majority of participants: it is about eSports and Dota 2. Imagine my surprise when some of the conference participants came just for us: with the PhD students from the University of Waterloo, we had an extremely nice dialogue that began with a discussion of the work and the statement of advice and notes and ended with a discussion of favourite eSports teams. It was very cool! This, perhaps, is the main charm of the conferences: getting acquainted with completely different people with whom you knowingly have common ground in the form of scientific interests that have united you in the same building.

Ekaterina Marchenko
3rd-year student of BA Sociology and Social Informatics, Research Group Participant

 We started planning a trip to the Sunbelt conference in the winter when we applied for participation. So, it was a long time ago and we were really happy to receive invitations to make a presentation or present posters. The long-awaited journey met our expectations - we received lots of useful comments after our presentations, listened to the well-known theorists and developers of software in the field of Social Network Analysis, visited many interesting talks. As the choice of sessions on Sunbelt was very huge, we were able to visit sessions devoted to important for us topics. It was great to just walk around the city between cozy houses. The conference was held at the University of Utrecht, in its oldest buildings with stained-glass windows and an organ in the hall. I enrolled in Utrecht for a program in sociology, and now I'm eagerly waiting for a student visa to return there.

Anastasiia Menshikova
A graduate of BA Sociology, Research Group Participant

 Lots of the Research Group members are using SNA methods for solving their research problems.  It is extremely important for understanding social algorithms and community analysis. During the conference, participants receive considerable comments and suggestions from leading specialists of SNA. Because of this, it was possible not only to talk about their researches but also to think about their development and improvement.