Category: News

bookmark_borderNew project: Data-Driven Risk Assesment in Infrastructure Networks

Posted on by frank

A new 4-year project together with the inspectorate of the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water will focus on new data-driven methods for risk assessment, with the aim to for example better coordinate inspection efforts. As part of this project, PhD students Antonio Barata and Gerrit-Jan de Bruin will work at LIACS on data of amongst other things (networks of) water transportation and vehicle movement. Welcome Antonio and Gerrit-Jan!

bookmark_borderNLeSC Young eScientist award 2017

Posted on by frank

During the yearly Netherlands eScience symposium in Amsterdam, I was awarded the 2017 Young eScientist award for my eScience-related research with amongst others the Dutch National Police, but primarily the research done within our CORPNET group at the University of Amsterdam. Following up on our recently published work on offshore finance, the awarded grant will allow us to further this direction of research, including several options for dissemination through an online interactive platform facilitating data exchange and visualization.

 

bookmark_borderNew paper on identifying Offshore Financial Centers using Network Science

Posted on by frank

Our paper on a new data-driven network-based method to identify offshore financial centers is out in Scientific Reports. Using a dataset consisting of over 70 million ownership relations between firms across the world, we identify countries that are disproportionately involved as sinks and conduits of value in the global corporate ownership network. The research sheds light on topics such as tax evasion, providing the most fine-grained insight in offshore finance to date. Also see the related article in The Guardian as well as Tweede Kamer (dutch parliament) questions and the ministry’s answers.

 

bookmark_borderBoundingDiameters algorithm implemented in Python NetworkX

Posted on by frank

In 2011, I devised together with colleague Walter Kosters a new algorithm to efficiently compute the diameter (and radius, core and periphery) of small world networks. It has been available for reuse for a few years as part of the teexGraph package, and I am happy to see that this algorithm is now also part of the master branch of the latest version of NetworkX, an extensive and frequently used Python package for network analysis. Happy computing!

 

bookmark_borderFaculty Award for Teaching 2016

Posted on by frank

I was pleasantly surprised to receive the “Teacher of the Year 2016” award from the Faculty of Science of Leiden University. I gratefully thank the students who nominated me, as well as those who have chosen to finally elect me as the winner. If you have any suggestions as to how I can spend the EUR 2500 associated with this award on teaching-related activities, let me know!