Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Takayuki Hiraoka @takayukihir.bsky.social · 18d

There are a few words that are clearly mispronounced, and the articulation is sometimes off. It also said that the presentation is by “Professor Kim”. But overall, it’s quite impressive how naturally it imitates a podcast-like conversation.

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Reposted by Takayuki Hiraoka

Nature @nature.com · 22d

Science isn’t really moving towards equity; institutions are just perfecting the appearance of equity. We need to build an alternative system, says Dolors Armenteras

go.nature.com/4nzGhp9

Equity in science is a beautiful lie — and I’m done pretending

Science isn’t really moving towards equity; institutions are just perfecting the appearance of equity. We need to build an alternative system.

go.nature.com

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Reposted by Takayuki Hiraoka

Juhi Kulshrestha @juhi153.bsky.social · 21d

We are hiring multiple PhD and postdocs for two newly funded projects at the intersection of mental health and political polarization at the CS Dept at Aalto, Finland. The PIs are Juhi Kulshrestha, Talayeh Aledavood, and Mikko Kivelä.

Full call text and link to apply: www.aalto.fi/en/open-posi...

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Reposted by Takayuki Hiraoka

Greg Albery @gfalbery.bsky.social · Sep 8

Celebrating the publication of our big collaborative spatial-social meta-analysis of density-dependent transmission effects, out now in Nature Eco Evo! doi.org/10.1038/s415... (or rdcu.be/eD6eB)

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Takayuki Hiraoka @takayukihir.bsky.social · Sep 7

Who knows, a conference in B_looming_ton might also be looming closer than you think😂

Takayuki Hiraoka @takayukihir.bsky.social · Sep 6

Interesting that every conference in 2026 takes place in a city called "B...ton" in a rather small corner of the world.

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Takayuki Hiraoka @takayukihir.bsky.social · Sep 6

A world map showing the locations of cities that hosted/will host international scientific conferences in 2025 and 2026. NetSci 2025 Maastricht, IC2S2 2025 Norkköping, and CCS 2025 Siena are on the left-hand side, while NetSci 2026 Boston, IC2S2 2026 Burlington, and CCS 2026 Binghamton are close together on the right-hand side.

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Reposted by Takayuki Hiraoka

Minsuk Kim @danielhankim.bsky.social · Aug 29

Q: How are resources consumed in transportation networks, and how does this shape the overall functioning of the system?

We introduce the minimum-cost percolation framework and apply it to the U.S. air transportation system using publicly available data.

🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Modeling resource consumption in the US air transportation system via minimum-cost percolation - Nature Communications

Percolation frameworks have been used to characterize the robustness of infrastructural networks. Here, authors introduce a percolation-based framework to study resource consumption and network effect...

www.nature.com

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Takayuki Hiraoka @takayukihir.bsky.social · Aug 29

We show that this approach is effective for citation networks, for which we would typically want the effect of publication dates to be discounted. It can be applied to other contexts too. Project led by Hasti Narimanzadeh and done in collaboration with Mikko Kivelä @bolozna.bsky.social

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Takayuki Hiraoka @takayukihir.bsky.social · Aug 29

Our paper about discounting the influence of node attributes from detected communities in networks is out in Physical Review E!
journals.aps.org/pre/abstract...

Block-corrected modularity for community detection

Unknown node attributes in complex networks may introduce community structures that are important to distinguish from those driven by known attributes. We propose a block-corrected modularity that dis...

journals.aps.org

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Takayuki Hiraoka @takayukihir.bsky.social · Aug 27

Happy to share this long-overdue project! We found that many real-world event sequences follow a surprisingly similar hierarchically structured pattern, and that multi-timescale memory mechanisms can explain this pattern. Feedback welcome!
arxiv.org/abs/2508.18281

Hierarchical organization of bursty trains in event sequences

Temporal sequences of discrete events that describe natural and social processes are often driven by non-Poisson dynamics. In addition to a heavy-tailed interevent time distribution, which primarily c...

arxiv.org

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Reposted by Takayuki Hiraoka

Hang-Hyun Jo @socph.bsky.social · Aug 27

Our new preprint with @takayukihir.bsky.social is out in arXiv: Takayuki Hiraoka‬ and Hang-Hyun Jo, Hierarchical organization of bursty trains in event sequences, arxiv.org/abs/2508.18281

Hierarchical organization of bursty trains in event sequences

Temporal sequences of discrete events that describe natural and social processes are often driven by non-Poisson dynamics. In addition to a heavy-tailed interevent time distribution, which primarily c...

arxiv.org

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Reposted by Takayuki Hiraoka

New papers in Network Science @networkspapers.bsky.social · Aug 15

PNAS: Strength and weakness of disease-induced herd immunity in networks
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2421460122?af=R

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Reposted by Takayuki Hiraoka

Nature @nature.com · Aug 5

Eighty years after the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan, we hear from one of the survivors

go.nature.com/45pj3e1

‘The Sun had fallen to Earth’ — a survivor’s recollection of the Hiroshima bombing

Eighty years after the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan, it is crucial that witness accounts are saved. Here is what one man told me.

go.nature.com

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Takayuki Hiraoka @takayukihir.bsky.social · Jul 23

IMO, Mendeley Desktop, the “legacy” desktop app develeped before Elsevier bought Mendeley the company, is still better in many aspects than its successor Mendeley Reference Manager developed by Elsevier (although I see improvements in the latter too)

Takayuki Hiraoka @takayukihir.bsky.social · Jul 23

This is a huge news to me—that Mendeley Desktop is not going to be discontinued—yet nobody in my timeline seems to be talking about it?
blog.mendeley.com/2025/07/09/m...

Mendeley Desktop is Here to Stay.

We previously announced that Mendeley Desktop would no longer be available for new downloads and installations (more details here). Many of you told us how much you love Mendeley Desktop …

blog.mendeley.com

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Takayuki Hiraoka @takayukihir.bsky.social · Jul 20

Thank you, Minsuk!

Takayuki Hiraoka @takayukihir.bsky.social · Jul 19

Paper: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
Press release: www.aalto.fi/en/news/herd...

Strength and weakness of disease-induced herd immunity in networks | PNAS

When a fraction of a population becomes immune to an infectious disease, the population-wide infection risk decreases nonlinearly due to collective...

doi.org

Takayuki Hiraoka @takayukihir.bsky.social · Jul 19

Exactly two years after we uploaded the first preprint, and after two rejections in other venues, I'm happy to see this paper published. Fantastic collaboration with Zahra Ghadiri, Abbas Rizi @abbasrizi.bsky.social, Mikko Kivelä @bolozna.bsky.social, and Jari Saramäki @jsaramak.bsky.social.

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Takayuki Hiraoka @takayukihir.bsky.social · Jul 19

We do not intend to claim that the network model is better than the mean-field model. Rather, we believe these two models represent opposite ends of the spectrum. Although mean-field models are predominantly used in epidemiology, one must be careful about relying only on the outcomes of one extreme.

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Takayuki Hiraoka @takayukihir.bsky.social · Jul 19

Mean-field models can only account for the first mechanism; the second mechanism is unique to network models. This results in a gap in herd immunity estimates. In our paper, we demonstrate this by comparing the two models informed by the same real-world contact data.

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Takayuki Hiraoka @takayukihir.bsky.social · Jul 19

To sum up, we found that: (1) while degree heterogeneity promotes the effect of high-degree bias, thereby reinforcing disease-induced herd immunity, (2) spatiality enhances the effect of immunity localization, which weakens disease-induced herd immunity.

Schematic figure showing the two drivers of disease-induced herd immunity, each influenced by an associated structural feature of the contact network. High-degree bias of immunity is enhanced by degree heterogeneity and has a positive effect on disease-induced herd immunity. Topological localization of immunity is enhanced by spatiality and has a negative effect on disease-induced herd immunity.

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Takayuki Hiraoka @takayukihir.bsky.social · Jul 19

The effect of localization is present in any sparse network, including the configuration model, but especially pronounced in spatially embedded networks. In fact, it is so strong that disease-induced immunity may provide weaker protection than random immunization even under degree heterogeneity.

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Takayuki Hiraoka @takayukihir.bsky.social · Jul 19

Of course, high-degree bias of immunity is present in network epidemic models, too. However, it is countered by the effect of immunity localization. The net strength of disease-induced herd immunity in networks is determined by the competition between these two mechanisms.

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Takayuki Hiraoka @takayukihir.bsky.social · Jul 19

This localization creates a mixing heterogeneity between immune and susceptible individuals. This is unfavorable for herd immunity because a large portion of the population is left susceptible and remains vulnerable to subsequent outbreaks. We characterize this using percolation theory.

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