Resources | Systems Science Interest Group at WUSTL | Washington University in St. Louis

The following SSIG meeting resources are organized by meeting date and are useful for understanding Systems Science. Resources are uploaded after every meeting.

April 19, 2023

The Isolated Den of Fox News: Citation network of news sources featuring a dashboard created with RShiny.

March 2, 2023

Taco Bell Lunch/Dinner Menu: A network demonstration of how Americanized Mexican fast-food is mostly all the same stuff in slightly different shapes
Complexity Explorables: A collection of interactive explorable explanations of complex systems in biology, physics, mathematics, social sciences, epidemiology, ecology and other fields

November 16, 2022

Inside the Far-right Podcast Ecosystem, Part 1: Building a Network of Hate: Mapping the growth of far-right hatespeech podcasts.
Social relationships between chimpanzees and gorillas
- Study reports first evidence of social relationships between chimpanzees, gorillas: The Source newsroom article
- Interspecific interactions between sympatric apes: iScience paper

May 4, 2022

Combs, Luke, Nelson, Purtle, & McQuire (2022): Using systems science methods to improve the use of research in evidence in policymaking [recording]
US. Street Network Shapefiles, Node/Edge Lists, and Graph ML Files: Shapefiles, node/edge lists, and GraphML files of the street networks of every city/town, urbanized area, county, census tract, and Zillow neighborhood in the United States. Street networks include public drivable streets. Created from OpenStreetMap data using the OSMnx software. Full methodological details in the related publications. (2018)

March 30, 2022

Ahnert (2013) Network analysis and data mining in food science: the emergence of computational gastronomy
Origin of Crops: Interactive maps and charts on where food comes from and where it goes

December 15, 2021

An et al (2021) Projecting the Influence of Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Warning Labels and Restaurant Menu Labeling Regulations on Energy Intake, Weight Status, and Health Care Expenditures in US Adults: A Microsimulation.
Retzlaff C.O., Ziefle M., Calero Valdez A. (2021) The History of Agent-Based Modeling in the Social Sciences. In: Duffy V.G. (eds) Digital Human Modeling and Applications in Health, Safety, Ergonomics and Risk Management. Human Body, Motion and Behavior. HCII 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 12777. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77817-0_22
Doing evaluation in service of racial equity
Systems Science of the Holidays
- Merry Christmas 2018: The Nativity – A Social Network Analysis
- The Definitive Analysis Of ‘Love Actually’
- DeJordy, Borgatti et al (2007): Visualizing Proximity Data. (Holiday-related data if you squint)

October 7, 2021

Physical Activity Promotion and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: Building Synergies to Maximize Impact
Nobel Prize in Physics Honors Work on Climate Change
Complex Systems Science & Systemic Racism

May 12, 2021

Connected Papers: A nifty bibliometric/network tool to explore the scientific field of a journal article of your choice.
Do you live in a political bubble? See the political leaning/voting trends in your neighborhood.
Science running in the family
- The Premonition: A Pandemic Story – A Michael Lewis book highlighting how Laura Glass’s childhood science project on airborne pathogen transmission was inspired by her father Robert’s work.
- Targeted Social Distancing Designs for Pandemic Influenza – The father-daughter publication that followed. (How excellent to have a scientific publication as a high school student!)

April 1, 2021

The Real Difference Between Google and Apple – interesting story featuring network data from the US Patent Office.

February 24, 2021

How Herd Immunity Works and What Stands in its Way: simulation of vaccination and infection rates.
To Understand This Era, You Need to Think in Systems: NY Times article on systems thinking & COVID.
Scriptapedia: An introduction to group model building that uses structured small group exercises called scripts.
Modeling to Learn: Provides resources for frontline healthcare teams to improve local care quality to better serve their community.

January 27, 2021

Spatial Microsimulation with R
Visualizing the White House COVID-19 Outbreak
Ross Hammond’s Testing Responses through Agent-based Computational Epidemiology (TRACE) work:
- Brown School working with St. Louis City on virus containment: The Source article describing the research
- TRACE-STL: Key initial results

February 27, 2020

markovifyR R package for Markov Chain machine learning.

November 13, 2019

Washington DC District Mobility: Multimodal Transportation in the District (example of excellent data visualizations)
Group Concept Mapping Co-author Network (check the northwest corner of the map for some WashU authors!)

October 17, 2019

April 18, 2019

Major Systems Science Conferences

Adopted from: Luke, D. A., Morshed, A. B., McKay, V. R., & Combs, T. B. (2017). Systems Science Methods in Dissemination and Implementation Research. In R. C. Brownson, G. A. Colditz, & E. K. Proctor (Eds.), Dissemination and Implementation Research in Health: Translating Science to Practice (Second Edition, New to this Edition:, pp. 157–174). Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.

Network Analysis
International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining	asonam.cpsc.ucalgary.ca
For more than a century, social networks have been studied in a variety of disciplines including sociology, anthropology, psychology, and economics. The Internet, the social Web, and other large-scale, socio-technological infrastructures have triggered a growing interest and significant methodological advancements in social network analysis and mining. Method development in graph theory, statistics, data mining and machine learning, and statistical mechanics is inspired by new research problems and, in turn, opens up further possibilities for application. These spiraling trends have led to a rising prominence of social network analysis and mining methods and tools in academia, politics, security, and business.
Sunbelt	insna.org
The International Sunbelt Social Network Conference is the official annual conference of the International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA). INSNA currently has over 1,000 members and more people than ever are interested in attending and presenting their work at Sunbelt conferences.
Complex Networks	https://www.complexnetworks.org
The International Conference on Complex Networks and their Applications aims at bringing together researchers from different scientific communities working on areas related to complex networks. Two types of contributions are welcome: theoretical developments arising from practical problems, and case studies where methodologies are applied. Both contributions are aimed at stimulating the interaction between theoreticians and practitioners.
System Dynamics
Conference of the System Dynamics Society	systemdynamics.org/conference
As new challenges emerge, it is increasingly important to have a systemic understanding of their effects and unknown risks to societies, infrastructure, business, economies, and governments. The speed and magnitude of these changes make management of emerging risks increasingly difficult. We welcome all research and documented consulting activities in System Dynamics including: applications, technical developments, software developments, and integration with other modeling and simulation techniques. We particularly encourage submissions from a cross-section of disciplines and domains of practice that expand our understanding of resilience and sustainability principles.
Innovations in Collaborative Modeling	cerc.msu.edu/projects/community/innovations-in-collaborative-modeling
The Innovations in Collaborative Modeling Conference features presentations, demonstrations, and posters pertaining to the use of a variety of quantitative systems modeling techniques to tackle social and environmental problems related to (but not limited to) food systems, natural systems, wildlife management, water, health, transportation, and education. Many of the most challenging social and environmental problems are generated by complex systemsExternal link – opens in new window. Quantitative systems modeling consists of a variety of techniques that represent the behavior of complex systems mathematically using computer simulation software. Such modeling can help to clarify the often puzzling dynamics of complex systems, leading to more effective problem solving efforts.
Agent-based Modeling
International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling & Prediction	sbp-brims.org
SBP-BRiMS is a multidisciplinary conference with a selective single paper track and poster session. The conference also invites a small number of high quality tutorials and nationally recognized keynote speakers. The conference has grown out of two related meetings: SBP and BRiMS, which were co-located in previous years.
Social Simulation Conference	http://www.essa.eu.org/event/social-simulation-conference-2019/
The conference is one of the key activities of the European Social Simulation Association (ESSA) to promote social simulation and computational social science in Europe and elsewhere.
Swarmfest	swarm.org
Swamfest is the annual meeting of the Swarm Development Group (SDG), and one of the oldest communities involved in the development and propagation of agent-based modeling. Swarmfest has traditionally involved a mix of both tool-users and tool-developers, drawn from many domains of expertise. These have included, in the past, computer scientists, software engineers, biomedical researchers, ecologists, economists, political scientists, social scientists, resource management specialists and evolutionary biologists. Swarmfest represents a low-key environment for researchers to explore new ideas and approaches, and benefit from a multi-disciplinary environment.

Divided Congress A YouTube network animation demonstrating the increase in Congressional partisanship over the last 60 years.

February 28, 2019

NDC-SDG Connections: The research and visualization project aim at illuminating synergies between the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Paris Agreement, and at identifying entry points for coherent policies that promote just, sustainable and climate-smart development

October 25, 2018

Magnify Your Voice A free civic action network that leverages the frontier of network science research to make civic engagement fun, easy, and social. Systems science in the service of civil progress.

May 23, 2018

Systems Science Methods in Public Health: Dynamics, Networks, and Agents Webinar presented by Doug Luke. (Link is to series archives – webinar should be up shortly.)

March 15, 2018

Political Networks in Kenya: Twitter thread and graphics examining the links between politicians and political parties in a parliamentary system.

The Controversial Theory That Explains the Structure of the Internet: Turns out that the power law of scale-free networks may not be as ubiquitous as we thought.

February 1, 2018

Awesome Network Analysis: An absolutely fantastic repository of network resources. Includes books, conferences, courses, datasets, journals, professional groups, papers, software, and more.

Collecting Ego Network Data with Shiny Apps: small online tool for collecting ego network data and saving it to Dropbox.

Code on Github
Ego Collection Demo: Online demonstration version. Doesn’t save data anywhere, so go ahead and play with it all you like.
Persistent data storage in Shiny apps: Other methods of storing data input to Shiny

Six Degrees of Francis Bacon

November 1, 2017

Trump campaign’s Russia ties

NIH General Guidelines for Authorship Contributions

October 4, 2017

SNA with Tidyverse

Introduction to Team Science

Claudel et al 2017: An exploration of collaborative scientific production at MIT through spatial organization and institutional affiliation

May 24, 2017

GENSI: New graphical tool to collect eco-centered network data

Network Resource Inventory: First steps in content for online tool of resources for network researchers.

Growing Inequality: New book on systems and health disparities.