Homophily at Academic Conferences.

Academic conferences are a backbone for the exchange of ideas in scientific communities. However, so far little is known about the communication networks emerging at those venues. Besides personal knowledge, network homophily has been identified as a driving factor for establishing contacts and followerships in social networks, i.e., people are more likely to engage with others if they are similar with respect to certain attributes. In this paper, we describe work in progress on investigating homophily at four academic conferences based on face-to-face (F2F) contact data collected using wearable sensors between conference participants. In particular, we study which personal attributes are predictive for face-to-face contacts. For that purpose, we obtained diverse personal attributes from online sources in order to elicit a variety of hypotheses, which can then be compared using descriptive statistics and a Bayesian method for comparing hypotheses in networks. Our results suggest that personal knowledge (as derived from DBLP and ResearchGate networks) and homophilic behavior with respect to several attributes, e.g., gender or country of origin, are important factors for contacts at academic conferences.