Participants of our Research Group at SocInfo'18

Members of our Research Group presented their poster “Network structure of e-shops profile as factor of its success: case of VK.com” at the 10th International Conference on Social Informatics, which was held in Saint Petersburg 25-28th of September (by the way, the 9th was held in Oxford, and the 11th will be held in Qatar).

SocInfo'18 is bringing together researchers from the computational and social sciences interested in joint research on the application of computational methods to the study of complex social processes and the use of social concepts in the design of information systems. This year, about 100 scientists and young researchers met at the event.

Traditionally, several workshops took place before the conference. This time they were devoted to topic modeling, big data analysis with applications in R and the analysis of multiplex networks. All the workshops were conducted using R, which helped to quickly get up to speed, since basic skills of programming on this language are given to us at the university, for example, on the Data Science minor.

The conference itself was held in two formats: oral presentations and a poster session. All the papers presented on the conference were published in a conference proceedings.

Since the format of the poster session involves direct communications with people (at least on the subject of your research), you had to leave the comfort zone and communicateJ In fact, it turned out to be extremely useful! Some participants were really interested in our work with Alena Suvorova, they expressed their thoughts on the possibilities of its development and improvement. Besides, we did not miss the opportunity to see what other researchers are doing. At the moment, I am interested in more technical aspects, so my attention was drawn mainly to researches of computer scientists. And what was funny, is that they, in turn, were looking for a specialist in the field of social sciences for collaborating in their research, because a competent interpretation of the results obtained is needed. By the way, I was one of the youngest participants, so it is not surprising that the level of the works presented at the conference seemed to me very high.

Olga Dornostup
Research Group participant