Tom A.B. Snijders is Professor of Methodology and Statistics in the Department of Sociology of the Faculty of Behavioral and Social Sciences at the University of Groningen, and at the University of Oxford he is emeritus fellow of Nuffield College and an associate member of the Department of Statistics. In Groningen, he works in the ICS (Interuniversity Center for Social Science Theory and Methodology), a research school that is a cooperative activity of the Universities of Groningen, Utrecht, and Nijmegen. His main research interests are the following: social network analysis, statistical methods for social networks and in network evolution, multilevel analysis of the textbook on Multilevel Analysis, written by himself and Roel Bosker, social science statistics in general, mathematical sociology, item response theory.

Tom Snijders is associate editor of 'Social Networks', 'Annals of Applied Statistics' and 'Journal of Social Structure', member of the Editorial Board of the journal 'Methodology', member of the European Academy of Sociology, member of the Editorial Board of the 'Statistics in the Social and Behavioral Sciences Series' of Chapman & Hall/CRC, member of Conseil Scientifique, Laboratoire d'Excellence Structuration des Mondes Sociaux, Toulouse, member of Scientific Council, Institute for Advanced Studies, Toulouse. In 2005 he was awarded an honorary doctorate in the Social Sciences at the University of Stockholm and in 2011 he received a honorary doctorate from the Université Paris-Dauphine.

At the NetGloW conference Professor Snijders will give a keynote talk devoted to ‘Dynamics of Multiple and Multilevel Networks’. He will also chair the session on ‘Statistical Network Modelling’ and teach a workshop on ‘Analysing Network Dynamics and Peer Influence Processes with RSiena’.

Peter Bearman is the Director of INCITE, the Cole Professor of Social Science, and Co-Director of the Health & Society Scholars Program. He was the founding director of ISERP, serving from the Institute's launch in 2000 until 2008. A specialist in network analysis, he co-designed the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. A recipient of the NIH Director's Pioneer Award in 2007, Bearman investigated the social determinants of the autism epidemic. He has also conducted research in historical sociology, including "Relations into Rhetorics: Local Elite Social Structure in Norfolk, England, 1540-1640" (Rutgers, 1993). He is the author of "Doormen" (University of Chicago Press, 2005). He is currently working on models for event sequences, social action, and strategies for qualitative research design; the neural signatures of social relations; and leading the REALM project on fair labor recruitment. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.

At the NetGloW conference Professor Bearman will deliver a keynote speech on ‘The neural foundations/signatures of status and the emergence of dyadic reciprocity and transitivity in human groups’.

Abstract of the keynote talk.

Robin Wagner-Pacifici is University in Exile Professor of Sociology at the New School for Social Research. She has written on social, political, and violent conflict and its termination. She is the author of The Art of Surrender: Decomposing Sovereignty at Conflict's End (University of Chicago Press, 2005), Theorizing the Standoff: Contingency in Action (Cambridge University Press, 2000), winner of the ASA Culture Section best book award), Discourse and Destruction: The City of Philadelphia vs MOVE (University of Chicago Press, 1994), and The Moro Morality Play: Terrorism as Social Drama (University of Chicago Press, 1986), and most recently, What is an Event? (University of Chicago Press, 2017). A collaboration analyzing official national security texts draws from both close (hermeneutic) and distant (computational) approaches to textual analysis. That project has generated several publications, ultimately aiming to map relational networks of international entities appearing in national security strategy reports. These publications include the article, “Graphing the Grammar of Motives in U.S. National Security Strategies: Cultural Interpretation, Automated Text Analysis and the Drama of Global Politics,” co-authored with John W. Mohr, Ronald L. Breiger, and Petko Bogdanov.

At the conference Professor Wagner-Pacifici will give a keynote talk on 'Varieties of Relational Experience in Security Strategy: Networks of Discourse' and will chair the session on ‘Qualitative Network Analysis'.

Abstract of the keynote talk

John Levi Martin received a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California at Berkeley, where he was recently a professor, after being a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and an assistant professor at Rutgers—The State University of New Jersey at New Brunswick. He is now a professor at the University of Chicago at Chicago, where he enjoys teaching classical theory and writing about himself in the third person.

He is best known for his mathematical modeling of the occupational standing of imaginary animals in a single children’s book; he has also written on, and occasionally researched, the formal properties of belief systems and social structures, the constitutional convention of 1787, the rationalization of infantry war, and the use of race as a conceptual category in American sociology. He recently finished a book that he started ten years ago, and enjoyed it so much that he is seriously considering reading another one again some time in the future.

At the NetGloW conference Professor Martin will give a keynote talk devoted to ‘Elite Political Fields as Systems of Interactions: The case of the Reichstag in Weimar Germany’ and will chair the session on ‘Network analysis of cultural and social duality’.

Abstract of the keynote talk.

Sophie Mützel is Professor of Sociology at the Department of Sociology, University of Lucerne, Switzerland. She teaches on the sociology of algorithms, big data and social media, as well as on metrics in journalism and the digital economy within the study program on “media and networks”. Her research interests focus on big data and its analytics, in particular text analytics and network analysis, as well as economic and cultural sociology. She recently finished a book manuscript on “Markets from stories”. Currently, she is PI of the Swiss National Research Program funded project "Facing Big Data: Methods and skills needed for a 21st century sociology".

Sophie studied Political Science at UC Berkeley (BA), Sociology at Cornell University (MA), and finished her PhD in Sociology at Columbia University, USA. After completing her PhD, she held a Jean Monnet Fellowship at the European University Institute, Italy; afterwards she taught and conducted research at Humboldt-University Berlin and at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Germany. She has been a research fellow at Harvard and held a guest professorship at the University of Vienna, Austria.

Sophie is co-organizer of the NRP75 funded international and interdisciplinary workshop on Women in Big Data, to be held in Zurich, June 14 and 15, 2018. She is also member of the executive committee for the NRP75 task force on ethical, legal, and social issues.

Abstract of the invited talk at the session ‘Qualitative network analysis’.

Nina Kolleck is Professor of Educational Research and Social Systems at Freie Universität Berlin. In 2013-2014 she was Head of a research group entitled “Positioning and Contribution of Foundations” (Positionierung und Beitrag von Stiftungen), Hertie School of Governance and Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg. Before she was Research associate (postdoc) at Freie Universität Berlin, Department of Education and Psychology, and Visiting Professor at the Department of Political and Social Sciences. Nina Kolleck got Prize of best teaching in 2016 and held anonymous expert activities for organizations that provide aid and funding, including the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) (within the scope of the P.R.I.M.E. – Postdoctoral Researchers International Mobility Experience – program).

Nina Kolleck is mentor for student aid for a German federal program for highly talented students, she got different scholarships and fellowships from foundations and DAAD. Member of the panel of experts to give expert opinions of master’s degree programs at ASH Berlin (Alice-Salomon Hochschule Berlin). Member of the panel of judges for the competition organized by the German Council for Sustainable Development (RNE) and the BMBF to promote local education and competency networks for sustainability. Member of the German Association of Educational Science (DGfE). Member of the German Association of Political Science (DVPW).

At the conference Prof. Kolleck will participate in the session on 'Network Analysis of Political and Policy-Making Domains'.

Abstract of the invited talk at the session 'Network Analysis of Political and Policy-Making Domains'.

Johan Koskinen is Lecturer in Social Statistics at the University of Manchester. He was awarded his PhD in Statistics from Stockholm University and then has worked at the universities of Stockholm, Melbourne and Oxford. He joined the University of Manchester in 2011. Johan has contributed to the development of a number of statistical models and inference procedures for social networks, in particular exponential random graph models (ERGM) and stochastic actor-oriented models (SAOM). He frequently gives training workshops on statistical methods for social networks to both novices and advanced users of social network analysis and he co-edited a recently published introductory book on ERGM with Dean Lusher and Gary Robins at the Universities of Melbourne and Swinburne.

At the conference Johan will participate in the session ‘Statistical Network Modelling’ and teach a workshop on ‘Bayesian Analysis of Networks Using ERGM’.

Abstract of the invited talk at the session ‘Statistical Network Modelling’.

Camille Roth is Associate Professor at Sciences-Po where he is a member of médialab and affiliated with the department of sociology. He has also been Tenured Researcher at CNRS in computer science since 2008, after being “maître de conférences” at the University of Toulouse-I. He holds a PhD in social science (Ecole Polytechnique, 2005), with a joint background in maths and physics (“ingénieur des Ponts”, 2002) and cognitive science (MSc EHESS, 2002). In the recent years, he founded and directed a team in computational social sciences within Centre Marc Bloch Berlin (an international CNRS/Humboldt Universität research unit), which gathers an interdisciplinary mix of young scholars with varied backgrounds spanning sociology and political science, computer science, cognitive science and linguistics.

His broader research program revolves around socio-semantic networks, dealing with knowledge dynamics and diffusion phenomena, including empirical applications on online and scientific communities. He has been global or local PI for several multi-institution research projects, both at the French and European level, on blog networks, scientific communities, and peer-to-peer platforms, including Webfluence, Algopol and Algodiv (both on informational dynamics of the digital public space) and QLectives (EU IP on quality collectives in socio-technical communities). Author of about 50 peer-reviewed publications, he currently supervises a team of several post-doctoral and doctoral researchers, either in computer science or in sociology.

At the conference Camille will chair the session on 'Making Sense of Big Network Data: Testing Hypotheses on New Data', participate in the session ‘Socio-Semantic Networks’ and teach a workshop on ‘Network Visualization Tools’.

Abstract of the invited talk at the session ‘Socio-Semantic Networks’.

Dr Peng Wang is a network methodologist who specializes in the development of statistical models for social network analysis. With a combination of skills in computer science, mathematics and statistics, and social network theory and analysis, Dr Wang has detailed understanding of the advantages of exponential random graph models (ERGMs) for social networks, as well as the challenges that need to be overcome. Collaborating with world renowned leaders in the field of social network analysis, Dr Wang personally contributed to the advance of ERGMs in model specifications, methods for simulations and estimations techniques, computational efficiency and model robustness, and model interpretations and empirical implications. Dr Wang developed the PNet software package for the simulation and estimation of ERGMs. The PNet software serves as an essential part of the SNA research team in Melbourne – MelNet, as well as the general SNA community. Dr Peng Wang’s work contribute to the development of ERGMs and PNet into cases of bipartite, multivariate, longitudinal, nodal attribute based and multilevel network models, with methodological developments on model specifications, conditional estimations on snowball sampled network data, models with missing network data, and models for large networks. He has publications in the fields of Management, Social Ecological Systems, Networks among Adolescents, Disease Transmission and Public Health Issues, Research Collaboration Networks, Political Networks and Interlocking Directorates networks.

At the conference Dr. Wang will participate in the session on 'Statistical Network Modelling' and teach a workshop on 'Multilevel ERGM Analysis with MPNet.

Abstract of the invited talk at the session 'Statistical Network Modelling'.