Confirmed speakers: 

Marco Ajmone Marsan (IMDEA Networks Institute, Spain)

Bio: Marco Ajmone Marsan is with the IMDEA Networks Institute in Spain. He was previously with the Politecnico di Torino and the University of Milan. He is IEEE Fellow, member of the Academia Europaea and of the Academy of Sciences of Torino. He is qualified as ISI Highly Cited  Researcher in computer science and listed among the Stanford University World’s Top 2% Scientists. He received a honorary degree from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics and the ACM SIGMETRICS Achievement Award.

Keynote title: The devil and the angels are in the details

Abstract: Modeling is the art of abstracting from real life to a simplified description, often aiming at mathematical tractability. 

Simplifying means removing many details of the real system’s operations, keeping those that are relevant for the investigation and neglecting those of lesser importance. However, detecting which details are important and which are not is often difficult.

This talk will reflect on this aspect of modeling, using some application examples.

Michela Chessa (Université Côte d’Azur, CNRS, GREDEG, France)

Bio: I am currently an associate professor (Maître de conférences) in economics at ELMI – Graduate School of Economics and Management, Université Côte d’Azur and a member of the Groupe de Recherche en Droit, Economie, Gestion (GREDEG, CNRS laboratory, UMR 7321) in Sophia Antipolis. For the current academic year 2025-2026, I am on a part-time délégation at Inria with the Neo team, Sophia Antipolis. My research interests lie in behavioral economics, with a particular focus on game theory as a tool for modeling and analyzing interactive decision making of economic agents. My methodology is mostly theoretical (with insights from mathematical optimization and operations research techniques) and, more recently, experimental. I am also interested in the computational aspects linked to the complexity of studying these interactions. My main domains of applications are (i) voting systems, social choice and cooperation (ii) personal data, privacy issues and the digital economy, (iii) graphs and hypergraphs, and (iv) routinization and creativity.

Keynote title: “Hypergraphs, clustering and games (joint work with Konstantin Avrachenkov)”

Abstract: Community detection is a central problem in network analysis. While classical approaches address pairwise interactions modeled by graphs, many real-world systems — from co-authorship networks to chemical reactions and ecological systems — exhibit group-level interactions that are naturally captured by hypergraphs.

In this talk, we introduce coalitional hedonic games, where players’ preferences are defined over subsets of arbitrary size rather than pairs, and characterize Nash-stable partitions via a pseudo-potential function. The value function governing coalition formation incorporates a tunable parameter p that controls how partial membership in a hyperedge contributes to a coalition’s worth, yielding a natural trade-off between a reward term, depending on the hypergraph structure, and a penalty term that, remarkably, depends only on coalition sizes.

We establish bounds on the reward factor via Jensen’s inequality, connecting the problem to the Deegan-Packel power index and enabling efficient approximate solutions. We also discuss algorithmic aspects and present computational experiments comparing our approach to classical community detection baselines.

Shmuel Zaks (Technion, Israel)

Bio: Shmuel Zaks holds BSc and MSc degrees in Mathematics from the Technion and a PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1971, 1972, 1979, resp.). In 1979 he joined the Henry and Marilyn Taub Faculty of Computer Science at the Technion, Israel, where he has been a Professsor since 2000, and the incumbent of the Joan Callner-Miller Chair in Computer Science since 2008. He was there until 2017, and since then he is there as a Professor Emeritus.

His research interests span a variety of topics in networking, combinatorics, graph theory, and other areas of Theoretical Computer Science with emphasis on discrete mathematics. His works on Networking include communication complexity in distributed computing, and studies of approximation algorithms and online algorithms in the context of optical networks. He published over 200 journals and conference papers, was on over 40 program committees, was a co-chair of the International Workshop on Distributed Algorithms on Graphs (WDAG), Haifa, Israel, in 1992 and of the International Colloquium on Structural Information and Communication Complexity (SIROCCO), Castiglioncello, Italy, in 2007. He supervised 20 graduate students, and received the Prize for Innovation in Distributed Computing, SIROCCO, in 2017.

His academic activities include visits and collaborations in numerous academic institutions and research centers abroad, including MIT, Institute IMDEA Networks in Madrid, Spain, INRIA Sophia Antipolis in France, and the University of Rome La Sapienza and the University of l’Aquila in Italy.

Keynote title: ” Theoretical studies of real problems in a variety of networks”

Abstract: The talk presents cases in which algorithmic and complexity issues are playing a central role in the study of a problems that arise in a variety of networks; These include distributed systems, optical networks, cellular networks, ATM networks and Quantum networks. In these cases, a problem initiated in a real application is first formulated as an optimization problem, usually with the aid of graph-theoretic terminology. The study of the problem then takes a variety of directions; these include designing of an efficient algorithm, analyzing the problem’s complexity, designing of an approximation algorithm, and designing of an online algorithm.

More info on the talks will be announced soon.