Our article "Proximity Dimensions and the Emergence of Collaboration: A HypTrails Study on German AI Research" has been accepted

This work leverages the framework HypTrails on the co-author network of German AI researchers to explorate and rank different arguments for collaboration. The work is called an excellent paper not only for the study of AI in Germany but also for the development of novel tools and approaches to analyze collaboration in other S&T disciplines. 

This collaborative work has been developed within the REGIO project with the help of our partners of INCHER Kassel, the  IBI located at Humbold University of Berlin and the L3S Research Center.

Abstract

Creation and exchange of knowledge depends on collaboration. Recent work has suggested that the emergence of collaboration frequently relies on geographic proximity. However, being  co-located tends to be associated with other dimensions of proximity, such as social ties or a shared organizational environment. To account for such factors, multiple dimensions of proximity have been proposed, including cognitive, institutional, oganizational, social and geographical proximity. Since they strongly interrelate, disentangling these dimensions and their respective impact on collaboration is challenging. To address this issue, we propose various methods for measuring different dimensions of proximity. We then present an approach to compare and rank them with respect to the extent to which they indicate co-publications and co-inventions. We adapt the \emph{HypTrails} approach, which was originally developed to explain human navigation, to co-author and co-inventor graphs.  We evaluate this approach on a subset of the German research community, specifically academic authors and inventors active in research on artificial intelligence (AI). We find that social proximity and cognitive proximity are more important for the emergence of collaboration than geographic proximity.