SCTPLS 35: Abstracts and Guest Speakers!

[Guastello, Stephen]

Don't forget to submit your abstracts by June 1st, 2025 for the

35th Annual International Conference of the SCTPLS

July 30, 2025- August 1st, at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, CO 

You won't want to miss Dr. Nicholas Stergiou, one of the guest speakers in his presentation entitled:

 

Variability in Movement

A large body of research demonstrates the existence of an optimal level of variability which enables us to interact adaptively and safely to a continuously changing environment, where often our movements must be adjusted in a matter of milliseconds. Decrease, or loss of this optimal level due to neurodegenerative and physiological disorders makes the system more rigid and less adaptable to different perturbations. Increase makes the system noisier and more unstable. Stable behavior is a rich behavioral state with high complexity, where complexity is defined as highly variable fluctuations in physiological processes resembling mathematical chaos and fractals thus being more nature based. In this keynote, I present updates of this field of research regarding the innovative “next step” that goes beyond the many descriptive studies that characterize levels of variability in various populations. This research aims to eventually devise novel interventions and technologies that will harness the existing knowledge on variability and create new possibilities for those in need to improve performance and/or restore their decreased physical abilities.

Dr. Stergiou is the Distinguished Community Research Chair and Professor in Biomechanics, a Director of the Center for Research in Human Movement Variability at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO), and an Assistant Dean and Director of the Division of Biomechanics and Research Development. His research focuses on understanding variability inherent in human movement, and he is an international authority in the study of Nonlinear Dynamics. It spans from infant development to older adult fallers and has impacted training techniques of surgeons and treatment and rehabilitation of pathologies, such as peripheral arterial disease. The work has been supported by more than 40 million dollars in funding from NIH, NASA, NSF, and many other agencies. He has published four scientific textbooks and 250+ peer-reviewed papers with 17000+ citations. He has been inducted as a Fellow to the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, the American Society of Biomechanics and the National Academy of Kinesiology.

We are looking forward to seeing you all there!

https://www.societyforchaostheory.org/conf/2025/

 

Cordially yours, the Conference Committee,

Adam Kiefer, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, (SCTPLS President-Elect and Conference Chair)

Barney Ricca, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs (SCTPLS President)

Charles Benight, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs

Cortney Armitano-Lago, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Stephen Guastello, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI

[Guastello, Stephen]

Don't forget to submit your abstracts by June 1st, 2025 for the

35th Annual International Conference of the SCTPLS

July 30, 2025- August 1st, at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, CO 

We are pleased to present Dr. Aaron Clauset as one of the guest speakers

in his presentation entitled:

 

Nearly-Optimal Prediction of Missing Links in Networks

Networks are ubiquitous in real-world data applications, e.g., in social network analysis or biological modeling, but networks are also nearly always incompletely observed. Current algorithms for predicting missing links in the hard case of a network without node attributes exhibit wide variations in their accuracy, and we lack a general understanding of how algorithm performance depends on the input network's characteristics. In this talk, I'll describe a powerful meta-learning solution to this problem that makes nearly-optimal predictions by learning to combine or 'stack' many individual link prediction methods. Using synthetic data for which we can analytically calculate the optimal performance and a large corpus of 550 structurally diverse networks from social, biological, technological, information, economic, and transportation domains, we systematically evaluate more than 200 link prediction methods individually and in combined stacked models. Across most settings, we show that model stacking nearly always performs best and produces nearly-optimal performance on synthetic networks. Furthermore, compared to state-of-the-art graph neural network techniques, we find that model stacking is typically more computationally efficient and equally accurate on multiple measures of performance. Applied to real networks, we find that the difficulty of predicting missing links varies considerably across domains: it is easiest in social networks and hardest in economic and biological networks, but performance depends strongly on network characteristics like the degree distribution, triangle density, and degree variation. I'll close with some commentary on future work on link prediction problem.

Aaron Clauset is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the BioFrontiers Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder, and is External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. He received a PhD in Computer Science, with distinction, from the University of New Mexico, a BS in Physics, with honors, from Haverford College, and was an Omidyar Fellow at the prestigious Santa Fe Institute. In 2016, he was awarded the Erdos-Renyi Prize in Network Science, and since 2017, he has been a Deputy Editor responsible for the Social, Computing, and Interdisciplinary Sciences at Science Advances. Clauset is an internationally recognized expert on network science, data science, and machine learning for complex systems. His research program is around two general themes: identifying fundamental principles of the organization and behavior of complex social and biological systems, and developing approaches for using data and computation to illuminate those ideas. A recent major focus of this work has been on the "science of science," where he studies the shape, origins, and consequences of social and epistemic inequalities on scientific careers, productivity, the spread of ideas, and the composition of the scientific workforce. His research results have appeared in many prestigious scientific venues, including Nature, Science, PNAS, SIAM Review, Science Advances, Nature Communications, AAAI, and ICDM. His work has been covered in the popular press by Quanta Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Discover Magazine, Wired, the Boston Globe and The Guardian.

Hotels and Lodging:

We have group rates for SCTPLS 2025 at the Spring Hill Suites by Marriott. Spring Hill Suites is located 402 S Tejon St, Colorado Springs, Colorado 80903. It is in the same bldg complex with Elements, where the conference meetings will be held. Make your hotel reservation by June 30 to get the special conference rates!

Lodging

Reminders:

The conference registration page is open. Early bird rates are in effect until July 10, 2025. And, of course, a reminder to submit your abstracts for conference presentations by June 1, 2025.

Registration

Abstract Submission