News

NEWS ROUND UP

We have been accelerating our efforts to bring data and network sciences to young people, including students at the Cisco Networking Academy at Chelsea CTE High School. We are working with our final cohort of network science students and will be doing the summative evaluation of the NSF ITEST funded NetSci High program in the spring and look forward to sharing the outcomes when they are available. All anecdotal evidence suggests that this program is extremely successful, and we are working on ways to make the program sustainable through expanding professional development for teachers, developing curricula for direct in-class, online, and hybrid instruction.

As part of this effort, we are developing a set of Network Literacy Essential Concepts and Core Ideas in collaboration with the global network science community, which will form the basis for what every 21st century citizen should know about networks. We will soon have a draft of these up on a new NetSciEd website.

Most recently, we have secured a small supplemental award from NSF to bring all our NetSci High students and teachers to the 6th International Workshop on Complex Networks, which we are hosting in March 2015. The NetSci High students will present their posters at CompleNet and will discuss their work with attendees, and will attend the entire conference and be able to network with some of the top researchers in the Network Science field, including some of the founders of the field such as Reka Albert and Mark Newman. CompleNet will include an “Art of Networks” exhibition as well as a public event that we are calling “Big Data Fest,” which will be a public event for our NYSCI family visitors. Our network science high school students and teachers will be involved in Big Data Fest, along with a number of outside organizations that are doing big data and network science related work. The Cisco Networking Academy students and teachers will be there throughout CompleNet and Big Data Fest.

To find out more about the NetSci High program, a preliminary paper has been uploaded to Arxiv and is available here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.3125

The International NetSci 2015 is coming up in June. This year, there is a call for Networks in Education papers for the main conference. And we are planning to once again to apply to have the NetSciEd Satellite Symposium take place before the NetSci 2015 conference.

Stay tuned!