This particular project considers the development of algorithms, methods and tools for trustworthy analysis of complex social network data. It is one of the subprojects (“tasks”) within the larger SSHOC-NL research infrastructure grant lead by ODISSEI and CLARIAH. Topics include network data interoperability (e.g., combining online, real-world and register-based data), data temporality (e.g., analyzing historical population data), and identity disclosure risk. The project runs from 2024 to the end of 2027 and is lead by Frank Takes (Leiden University) and Eelke Heemskerk (University of Amsterdam). Positions (PhD and postdoc) are expected to open late 2023 or early 2024, and will be based respectively at the computer science and social science department of the two universities involved.

How anonymous is an individual in a social network, based on the structural position of this person in a network, as well as the person’s descriptive attributes? That’s the central question studied in the ANO-NET project, which runs from 2021 to 2025 and is jointly funded by Statistics Netherlands (CBS) and the Population-scale Social Network Analysis (POPNET) platform.

On July 30, I give a keynote talk at the 7th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2 2021) with the title “Population-scale Social Network Analysis”; describing some of the fundamental challenges in the recently started POPNET project, as well as some first early empirical results on the small-world structure of such networks. If you are interested, have a look at the slides of my IC2S2 2021 talk.

Also see the other contributions to the conference by my Leiden CNS group.

In the coming 5 years, Statistics Netherlands (CBS), Leiden University and the University of Amsterdam (UvA) will work together on a project with the aim of doing population scale social network analysis. This entails not only cutting edge computational social science research into large-scale network data, but also necessary research infrastructure. The project is the result of a € 1M grant from the PDI-SSH initiative and aims to set up a community of researchers around the topic. Stay tuned for more information!

A new 2-year project on the prediction will start on September 1, 2020 and is concerned with predicting crime from dark web forum networks. The project is a collaboration between the Dutch National Police as part of the “Politie en Wetenschap” funding scheme, Leiden University (Faculty of Law, Criminology and Faculty of Science, Computer Science).