Going Interdisciplinary - Structural Balance from the Physics Perspective

The VVN invites you to a lecture by prof. dr. Jan Ryckebusch, best known by Physics students for his courses Quantum Mechanics 1, Statistical Physics, Computational Physics and much more.

In this lecture prof. Ryckebusch will be talking about his research that is far from our textbook comfort-zone, namely relationships in socioeconomic networks:

Structural balance is a prevailing theory for understanding the creation and dynamics of active relationships (friendly or hostile) in socioeconomic networks. The methodology of Statistical Physics offers opportunities to view structural balance from a different angle and even extend it. A physics-based model for structural balance is proposed. It is suitable for empirical analysis of political networks and allows to uncover generative mechanisms. It is tested on an dataset for the relationships between alliances in a massively multi-player on-line game (MMOG) and on real-world data for the relationships between countries during the Cold War era.

Don’t be scared off by the difficult abstract, and be persuaded by Jan’s enthusiastic way of explaining!

The lecture will be held in English (but don’t worry we still speak Dutch).

Registering is mandatory and can be done by dialing the link: https://forms.gle/dX4Vb3AJRVHV1cxC6