EUSN 2026 and other international summer conferences: where laboratory members presented
This summer, members from the International Laboratory for Applied Network Research participated in several international conferences on network analysis and control theory. Polina Ermolaeva presented in person at EUSN 2026 in Sweden, Lika Kapustina and Natalia Matveeva presented their joint research online at Sunbelt and EUSN, and Ilya Petrov presented a poster presentation online at the IFAC World Congress in Busan.
About the EUSN Conference
From August 11th to 15th, the 8th European Conference on Social Networks (EUSN 2026) was held in Norrköping, Sweden. EUSN is the second-largest conference on network analysis after Sunbelt, and is held in a European country approximately every two years. This year's organizer was the Institute of Analytical Sociology (IAS) at Linköping University.
The program included several formats. Workshops led by renowned experts in network analysis took place on the first and last days, while on the remaining days, participants presented papers in parallel sections. The conference was opened and closed by two keynote speakers. On the first day, Andreas Flache, Professor of Sociology at the University of Groningen, presented a paper on agent-based modeling and its implications for social science. On the final day, Elisa Bellotti, Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester, discussed analogical theorizing in social networks and the integration of mathematical and social theory. The conference also had a poster session; this year, one poster was presented, which was named the best.
Report by Polina Ermolaeva
At the conference, in the "Modeling Social Influence" section, I presented a paper on my master's thesis. It examines selection and influence effects in adolescent sexual debut. I work with panel network data and use stochastic actor-based modeling for my analysis. There were many researchers at the conference working with this method, and I was eager to hear their opinions on my work. I presented preliminary results last year at Sunbelt, where I received many valuable comments and suggestions for improvement. I then won a research competition with the same paper, which allowed me to attend EUSN this year. I think my presentation was a success: I received positive feedback from my colleagues and very helpful feedback.
Participating in the conference was a great pleasure and a very emotional experience. I've repeatedly noted the openness and friendliness of the online community. I had the opportunity to interact with both young researchers, who, like me, were nervous before their presentations, and with established scholars who perhaps concealed their nerves a little better. Everyone was eager to engage in dialogue, happy to answer questions and talk about their research. I'd especially like to highlight the venue: Norrköping turned out to be a very pleasant and calm town—I think it's a good place to work. In addition to my section, I attended many presentations in the section on intergroup relations. Interactions between schoolchildren from different ethnic groups is another of my research interests, so it was useful to learn how they are studied in other contexts and how the field is developing. Many of the studies impressed me with their innovativeness. I particularly enjoyed the section on stochastic actor-based modeling (RSiena). The creators and developers of the method shared their latest developments and greatly inspired me to use them. A book on SAOM will soon be published in the Structural Analysis in the Social Sciences series—I'm also very much looking forward to it. It also turned out that RSiena was celebrating an anniversary this year: the office was decorated with balloons, and at the end of the session, Tom Snyders (the creator of the method) blew out the candles on the cake he'd been given. It was very cozy and homey. It's funny that last year I also attended an RSiena session—at Sunbelt—and understood much less than I did now. It's great to watch my own development.
Reports by Lika Kapustina and Natalia Matveeva at EUSN and Sunbelt
This summer, Lika Kapustina presented a joint study with Natalia Matveeva online at the Sunbelt and EUSN. The study explored how collaborations between Russian universities have evolved over the past thirty years. Using data on publications from universities listed in the "Priority 2030" program (N = 141) from the OpenAlex database, the authors constructed co-authorship networks (nodes represent universities, connections represent joint publications) and, using cluster analysis and blockmodeling, traced their evolution from 1991 to 2025. Preliminary results show that the number of universities involved in research has increased over this period (especially since the 2010s), the division into clusters largely corresponds to geographic proximity, and the structure of collaboration is extremely heterogeneous: there is a small, highly productive core and a periphery with little interaction—that is, "university science" in Russia is currently represented primarily by a small group of leading universities. The paper is currently being actively revised and prepared for submission to an international scientific journal.
Poster presentation by Ilya Petrov at the IFAC World Congress
The 23rd World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC World Congress 2026) is taking place in Busan, South Korea, from August 23 to 28. Founded in 1957, IFAC brings together researchers in the field of automatic control and its applications in engineering, science, and social affairs. Its World Congress is the federation's flagship event, held every three years and attracting thousands of participants from around the world. The 2026 Congress was the largest in its 69-year history, with over 4,400 participants from 73 countries and nearly 3,000 papers.
Ilya Petrov presented a poster paper, "Policy Design for Games on Multiplex Networks via Graph Limits," at the congress.
