Federico Battiston, Associate Professor in CEU’s Department of Network and Data Science, has been honored with the 2022 Complex Systems Society Junior Award. This junior scientific award recognizes extraordinary scientific achievements by CSS young researchers within ten years of PhD completion.
According to the Complex Systems Society, Battiston was awarded “For his key and pioneering contributions on generalized network structures such as multilayer and higher-order networks, and for his many contributions to the structuring and development of the complex systems community.”
On the occasion of the award Battiston remarks, "The complex systems community is my home and this award means a lot to me. The conference on complex systems in Barcelona in 2013 was the first one I had ever attended." Since then Battiston has regularly contributed to the community not only through research but also service, including serving as a chair the young researchers of the community in 2016-2017.
This award recognizes in particular Battiston's work on higher-order networks. "Traditional networks aim to describe interacting relational systems where units are described by nodes, while links encode their pairwise connections. For this reason, traditional networks are inherently limited to pairwise interactions only," explains Battiston. He adds, "Over the last three years I have provided key contributions to the new theory of higher-order interaction networks, which allow encoding of natural group (higher-order) interactions."
Battiston's research has been published in the best international journals including Nature Physics, Nature Communications and Nature Human Behavior. He is the first author of "Networks beyond pairwise interactions: Structure and dynamics" which has collected over 500 citations to date. He is additionally the editor of "Higher Order Systems", part of the Springer Understanding Complex Systems series.
The Complex Systems Society aims to promote complex systems research pure and applied, assist and advise on problems of complex systems education, consider the broader relations of complex systems to society, foster the interaction between complex systems scientists of different countries, establish a sense of identity amongst complexity scientists and represent the complexity community at all international levels.
To learn more about the programs of CEU’s Department of Network and Data Science, visit here.
