Let the science and math begin! With its Kick-Off Meeting, the EU-funded Marie Skłodowska–Curie Doctoral Network BeyondTheEdge has officially commenced its scientific program. The meeting featured a social ice breaker, training sessions ranging from scientific integrity to open science for the PhDs as well as supervisor training, and a scientific symposium. This was the first time that the newly recruited PhD students met in person with the researchers forming the consortium.
Four invited speakers gave complementary angles on "Higher-Order Networks and Dynamics", the main theme of BeyondTheEdge. Higher-order network interactions capture how groups of more than three agents behave differently from pairs: For example, group interactions shape epidemic outbreaks across human social networks. As invited speakers, Arkady Pikovsky (Universität Potsdam) provided insights on coupled oscillator dynamics, Desmond Higham (University of Edinburgh) touched upon epidemic spreading, Marilyn Gatica (Northeastern University London) talked about higher-order interactions in neuroscience, and Giulio Zucal (MPI-CBG) gave an introduction to hypergraph limits.