Abstract: 

Have you ever wondered about how those data scientists at Facebook and LinkedIn make friend recommendations? Or how epidemiologists track down patient zero in an outbreak? If so, then this tutorial is for you. In this 3.5 hr tutorial, we will use a variety of datasets to help you understand the fundamentals of network thinking, with a particular focus on constructing, summarizing, and visualizing complex networks.

Upon completing this tutorial, you will be:
- familiar with how to use the NetworkX and nxviz Python packages for modelling and rationally visualizing networks,
- able to load node and edge data from a Pandas dataframe,
- familiar with object-oriented and matrix-oriented representations of graphs,
able to find paths between nodes, interesting structures in graphs, and projections of bipartite graphs.
- (if time permits) able to use matrix operations to simulate diffusion of information on networks

Bio: 

Eric is an Investigator at the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, where he solves biological problems using machine learning. He obtained his Doctor of Science (ScD) from the Department of Biological Engineering, MIT, and was an Insight Health Data Fellow in the summer of 2017. He has taught Network Analysis at a variety of data science venues, including PyCon USA, SciPy, PyData and ODSC, and has also co-developed the Python Network Analysis curriculum on DataCamp. As an open source contributor, he has made contributions to PyMC3, matplotlib and bokeh. He has also led the development of the graph visualization package nxviz, and a data cleaning package pyjanitor (a Python port of the R package).