Project Grant 2154100

This three-year project grant from the National Science Foundation's Division of Computing and Communication Foundations, under the Computer and Information Science and Engineering federal grant program (CFDA 47.070), provides $681,272 to Northwestern University to advance the understanding of network science and network inference. Specifically, the university will study more expressive and realistic formulations of community detection in networks that move beyond the standard stochastic block model. This includes work on community detection in hypergraph generalizations of stochastic block models, using tensor methods to find overlapping communities in hypergraphs, recovering hierarchical community structure, and analyzing the capabilities and limits of simple spectral algorithms for various community detection problems. The university will develop new mathematical and algorithmic techniques involving random matrices and random tensors to tackle these questions in community detection. Outreach to middle and high school students is also supported. The project will involve graduate student training and co-mentorship across computer science and mathematics departments.