From November 10–14, 2024, the Kick-Off Meeting for the Marie Skłodowska–Curie Doctoral Network BeyondTheEdge: Higher-Order Networks and Dynamics took place at Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam. The event marked the official start of the project, bringing together a dynamic community of researchers, doctoral candidates, and supervisors working on higher-order interaction networks from across Europe and beyond. As the project moves forward, the Kick-Off built a strong foundation for the collaborative effort behind BeyondTheEdge to push the boundaries of our understanding of higher-order networks and their dynamics.
Training
The Kick-Off featured several training activities for the PhD students and supervisors, lead by dedicated trainers at VU Amsterdam. This included training in Open Science, where they learned about the process of scientific publications and collection and handling of large data sets. This was followed by courses on Scientific Integrity and Scientific Writing. Furthermore, the students and the supervisors had an interactive program on the process of PhD supervision, where they could discuss questions concerning communication, feedback, responsibilities between them and their supervisors. For the supervisors, a complementary training session covered potential pitfalls in PhD supervision. These sessions emphasized BeyondTheEdge's commitment to fostering an ethical and collaborative research environment.The consortium also started planning the next programs of the BeyondTheEdge network. This will directly involve of the students to directly and indirectly train transferable skills.
Scientific Symposium
A two-day symposium showcased cutting-edge research on higher-order networks and dynamics to connect the various strands of research present in the project. In addition to the consortium researchers, 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.