Petter Holme

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Scandinasian professor of network science
Webhttps://petterhol.me
arXiv alert 📄🚨
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05743
This was such a fun paper to write! The development leading up to today’s social/behavioral science with AI agents. The history itself is a roller-coaster ride connecting many of the big themes of 20/21 century human-centric science, namechecking heroes from Margaret Mead to Marvin Minsky, from Kenneth Colby to Kathleen Carley, along the way.

I channeled my inner Marvin Minsky to give a different perspective on AI science than the usual (hmm, shortsighted) stuff. It ended up being about how our lazy attitude toward our language stops science from its (utopian-level) full potential … and many other musings on language, technology, and human knowledge.

https://petterhol.me/2025/02/09/essay-time-ai-and-sciences-happy-ending/

Essay time: AI and science’s happy ending

I’ve been a bit disappointed with the debate about the future use of AI in science. Either it has been short-sighted: “Wow, let’s try this thing we’ve always been doing, but…

Petter Holme

Network (well, adjacency matrix) of the day.

From Eric Rehnman's "Managing the community hospital: Systems analysis of a Swedish hospital" (1973)

Proud to be elected fellow of the Network Science Society class of 2024. Thanks to my PhD student no. 1, 3, and 4 for receiving the plaque. ☺️

Network of the day

From: Chroscicki, Odinec, 1981. On Directed Graph Models on Influences in Art Theory. Artibus et Historiae 2:113-130.

Network of the day: Events in the development of the video tape recorder. (Benn, Narin, 1968)
(now with a more apt cover pic)
I've been experimenting with animated visualizations of multi-layer networks. This is Krackhardt's tech manager data: the black network in the foreground shows the company hierarchy, the underlying links show who the managers (nodes) think others go to for advice, and the order of the layers is sorted by visual similarity (which by necessity is pretty big in this case).
The doomiest way of node deletion. (From Doxiadis' "Ekistics.")

Network on IBM mainframe computer ad (1970s).

https://youtu.be/wIjgZhAjQS4

1970's IBM vintage computer promotional film (original upload) IBM Mainframe, RAMAC

YouTube