lundi 23 novembre 2015

Conference and Workshop on Social Network Analysis, 6th-8th January 2016

The EGI will host a Conference and Workshop on Social Network Analysis for students and early career researchers. The meeting will be held in the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, from Wednesday 6th January – Friday 8th January 2016. Registration is free to all participants. Unfortunately, we will not be able to offer financial support to cover travel or accommodation expenses. Booking or request for further details should be sent to SNAworkshop@zoo.ox.ac.uk by Friday, 27th November. The workshop will be limited to 15 participants; places will be filled in accordance with the first-come first-served principle.
This meeting aims to provide PhD students in the field of animal behavior with skills for understanding and applying SNA, as well as to foster exchange and discussion among a small group of early-career researchers. Depending on space availability, we might consider applications by early post-doc researchers as well.
The meeting will consist of a half-day conference followed by a two-day workshop on social network analysis (SNA). We are pleased to announce that Dr. Lucy Aplin will open the conference with a talk about her exciting work on social ecology of great tits and blue tits studied in Wytham Woods, Oxfordshire. She has been studying social and ecological processes structuring group composition, and recently used social network analysis to investigate the spread of novel behaviours and animal culture in tit populations. Lucy is a Junior Research Fellow at St John’s College and member of the EGI. More information about her current and recent work can be found on her personal website: https://sites.google.com/site/lucymaplin/home
Conference attendees will have the opportunity to present and discuss their current projects, which may be in any state of completion. For example, participants might prepare a poster to introduce their study system, outline their proposed research questions, and discuss possibilities for using SNA once they have collected data. We ask all participants, who wish to present a poster, to prepare a very short presentation of three minutes (maximum of three slides), which should be designed to attract attention to the poster.
The 2-day workshop on January 7th-8th will be led by Dr. Damien Farine, Research Associate at EGI and Principal Investigator at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology Department of Collective Behaviour. Day 1 will cover fundamental theory of network analysis, and Day 2 will give attendees the chance to apply SNA software tools and use R to analyse either their own data or to work through provided examples. No previous experience with social network analysis is required to attend this course. For more information on the workshop, please visit Damien’s webpage: https://sites.google.com/site/drfarine/teaching/sna_workshop
The workshop will be based in the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford. We will also organise some evening social events to give participants the opportunities to network both with each other and with researchers at the EGI.