Invited Talk: Facing Symmetry in Practice: DOs and DON'Ts of avoiding repeats

Pascal Schweitzer, TU Darmstadt

In the talk, I will give a gentle introduction to the various types of problems involving symmetry that appear during combinatorial calculations. In fact, challenges with symmetries appear in diverse contexts, such as SAT-solving or integer programming but also when generating objects up to isomorphism. I will highlight traditional and recent methods as well as tools that can be leveraged to overcome these problems or speed up computation. The talk will end with challenges that one encounters in current implementations, such as questions of interfaces, changing computational models, and dynamic exploitation of symmetries.

Invited Talk: Social Network Analysis: From Clustering to Link Recommendation

Yllka Velaj, University of Vienna

In recent years, social networking platforms have enhanced our connections and access to information. Understanding the structure and dynamics of these social networks is crucial and has attracted attention from various fields, including marketing and epidemiology.
In this talk, we will explore methods to address these challenges.
First, we introduce SpectralMix, a clustering algorithm designed to reveal major patterns in attributed multi-relational networks and detect dependencies between graph structure and user attributes. Next, we discuss a link recommendation algorithm aimed at maximizing information diffusion within networks.