Santa Fe Institute Co-Authorship Network Simulation

During the 2018 Santa Fe Institute Graduate Workshop in Computational Social Science, I had the opportunity to work with a partner, Jeff Jacobs, on a challenge from the Etherium Foundation. We modeled how information and trust flows within a network, and applied this to a co-authorship network. We simulated networks to test how the network structure would change if co-authors were more willing to author outside their area of expertise, and their own level of generalized “talent.” We found that the network parameters set to match real world data are not most beneficial for anyone, suggesting that willingness to co-author outside your field would promote a more cohesive research community. Over the course of this project, I was responsible for the literature review, generating the networks, and creating visualizations. You can see our report here.