A personal update | #09

News about career, life, and academia as I bring this newsletter to you

Hello 👋 ,

Where did September go? Thank you for being patient with me and my newsletter while I only just barely held onto time as it barreled by this past month. I’ll use this week to share some personal and professional updates in my life.

Personal

My son turned one year old in September, which provided moments of awe, wonder, and pure curiosity for how my wife and I managed through such a big year of change via parenthood. It is a hard job. Life, and the love surrounding it, has expanded with new friends, connections, and experiences as a growing family. Many of them we celebrated and spent time with in generally offline, “touch grass” type of settings. I think it is healthy to separate and recharge occasionally.

Professional

I’ve started a new role as Director of Data Engineering at Arbol, a parametric insurance and derivatives company for hedging climate risk across the world. Renewable energy and agriculture are two of the focus industries right now. In addition, the company believes in the power of decentralization and has invested in creating dClimate, a network for critical climate data feeds and geospatial datasets. My team is fully remote and I will continue building an outstanding distributed, async team culture.

This means I have left the Chainverse and Diamond DAO core teams. I remain deeply interested in knowledge graphs, collective search and discovery, and blockchain technologies. However professionally I needed a change and a new problem domain to learn about.

Academic

Additionally, I continue taking courses toward my Systems Science PhD. This fall I’m taking Advanced Topics in Network Science with my advisor Hiroki Sayama. Here’s a list of papers I’ve read for that this past month:

Network science

• Barabási, A. L. (2013). Network science. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A, 371(1987), 20120375.

What are the essential concepts about networks?

• Sayama, H., Cramer, C., Porter, M. A., Sheetz, L., & Uzzo, S. (2016). What are essential concepts about networks?. Journal of Complex Networks, 4(3), 457-474.

Computation of the traveling salesman problem by a shrinking blob

• Jones, J., & Adamatzky, A. (2014). Computation of the travelling salesman problem by a shrinking blob. Natural Computing, 13(1), 1-16.

Exploring network structure, dynamics, and function using NetworkX

• Hagberg, A., Swart, P. J., & Schult, D. A. (2008). Exploring network structure, dynamics, and function using NetworkX. In Proceedings of the 7th Python in Science Conferences (SciPy 2008), pp. 11-16.

Collective dynamics of ‘small-world’ networks

• Watts, D. J., & Strogatz, S. H. (1998). Collective dynamics of ‘small-world’networks. Nature, 393(6684), 440-442.

Emergence of scaling in random networks

• Barabási, A. L., & Albert, R. (1999). Emergence of scaling in random networks. Science, 286(5439), 509-512.

Community detection in networks

• Fortunato, S., & Hric, D. (2016). Community detection in networks: A user guide. Physics Reports, 659, 1-44.

Graph spectra and the detectability of community structure in networks

• Nadakuditi, R. R., & Newman, M. E. (2012). Graph spectra and the detectability of community structure in networks. Physical review letters, 108(18), 188701.

Quite the list! The themes connecting each of these papers are computation of network structures and algorithms to define communities within graphs. As I settle into my new role and find a new rhythm for updates I will be sure to add more insights to future Emergent Outcomes newsletters.

Thank you for reading and sticking around while I create some order during a time of change in my life. Please reach out or leave a comment if you are curious about anything here.