Giovanni Petri’s study will lead to a better understanding of how the brain processes multiple interactions at once, and how group interactions evolve in social groups.
LONDON — Northeastern University network science professor Giovanni Petri expects to break new ground with a study on how the brain processes multiple interactions at once.
Petri and his team at the university’s London branch of the Network Science Institute also plan to investigate how group interactions evolve in social situations as part of a five-year project.
The work will be made possible through a grant from the European Research Council (ERC), which is the science and technology funding body of the European Union.
Petri says the grant from the Brussels-based council, which is the highest level of research funding available in Europe, will support experiments that have the potential to bring about a real change in understanding complex systems.
“The ERC in Europe — and also I think outside of Europe — carries an important brand that is even stronger than just the money that it gives you,” he says. “It really means that the work that you are proposing is recognized as excellent at the European level, but also shows that it has impact. So it is not just about having a great idea, but also something that could really change many things.”
Where that change comes in is a better understanding of what network scientists refer to as “higher-order” relationships — a term that describes interactions between more than two people, animals or objects.
Petri explains that the complexity of higher-order interactions has often been “overlooked” in the field of network science, with the knock-on impact being that it has hindered the “ability to comprehend and forecast” the dynamics in situations that involve more than a pair of interactions.
Researchers within Northeastern’s Network Science Institute have been getting to grips with higher-order interactions in recent papers but are currently reliant on existing data to test their models of how group interactions change the dynamics in a complex system involving multiple connections.
It really means that the work that you are proposing is recognized as excellent at the European level, but also shows that it has impact.Giovanni Petri, a network science professor at Northeastern
It really means that the work that you are proposing is recognized as excellent at the European level, but also shows that it has impact.
But with the new ERC-funded Reconstruction and Unification of Neural and Ecological Systems (Runes) project, the aim is to conduct experiments where Petri and his team can be in full control of the different scenarios.
“We have the models and we have some observations, but they are based on datasets that already exist,” Petri explains.
“Instead, what we would like to do is to have experiments in which we can control who talks, when, with whom, and how many people are in that interaction. We want to see how that changes the outcome of the operation, to see if there is a new norm that evolves or whether there is a new habit that wipes through the population, and so on.”
One experiment the funding will pay for is about understanding information integration in the brain, Petri says.
He gives the example of someone driving a car while listening to instructions from a navigation system — that activity involves two tasks: driving and listening. That information is integrated by a motorist’s brain because the two things influence one another.
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Petri wants to understand what happens when there are even more inputs — such as speaking to two friends who are in the car but while also paying attention to the navigation directions — to understand how the brain integrates those different patterns of information.
“Using mathematics — that we have in-part already developed but that we are also going to be developing further — and linking it to the data, we are going to try and figure out how these patterns change when you are in these different situations,” he adds.
The second experiment will be about group coordination and how social groups make decisions.
“We’re going to do this by basically putting people on an online platform and having them interact in pairs before seeing what changes when the architecture of the interactions is different,” says the Italian academic.
It will be the first time the London-branch of the Network Science Institute has run its own experiments, with Petri now tasked with recruiting new post-doctoral staff to help run the neuroscience and the social science experiments.
The plan is to produce a paper before the five years is up, with the prospect of pitching for more funding to continue the experiments. The consolidator grant from the ERC was nearly 2 million euros ($2.09 million U.S. dollars).
Petri says: “We haven’t really done experiments … so we have to figure out so many things about how this is going to work in practice. But it is a great and amazing opportunity. We have got the next five years mapped out.”
The funding award is just the latest success for the NetSI London team. Associate professor Riccardo Di Clemente and postdoctoral research assistant Nandini Iyer were part of a three-person team who won the Data Challenge Award for Best Paper at the NetMob 2024 conference that was hosted by the World Bank in Washington, D.C., in October.
Tasked with analyzing global mobility data in developing countries, Di Clemente, Iyer and colleague Massimiliano Luca, from the Italian research institute Fondazione Bruno Kessler, explored the disparities people in rural and urban communities face when moving around in Colombia, India and Mexico.
Di Clemente says their winning paper identified mobility patterns that reflected how urbanization and infrastructure gaps had impacted upon travel.
“The study highlights how rural areas face greater challenges, particularly during longer trips, and provides insights for more inclusive, sustainable infrastructure planning,” he adds. “Our findings underscore the importance of considering mobility dynamics, rather than solely population density or administrative boundaries, to define urban and rural areas.”