Professor Kirkley, Alec William

PhD University of Michigan
Assistant Professor

Email: akirkley@hku.hk
Homepage: https://aleckirkley.com/
Office location: P307I, Graduate House, HKU

 

Dr Alec Kirkley is an Assistant Professor hosted by the School of Computing and Data Science and co-hosted by the Department of Urban Planning and Design at HKU. His research focuses on theoretical and computational aspects of network science, complex systems, and statistical physics, along with applications of these ideas to urban and social systems. He utilizes tools from a range of disciplines including information theory, Bayesian inference, statistical physics, scientific computing, and machine learning to develop new methods in his research. He received his PhD in Physics at the University of Michigan in 2021 under the supervision of Mark Newman.

Research Interests

Network Science, Complex Systems, Statistical Physics, Statistical Inference

Selected Publications

• A. Kirkley, Fast nonparametric inference of network backbones for weighted graph sparsification. Physical Review X (2025).
• A. Kirkley, H. Felippe, and F. Battiston, Structural Reducibility of Hypergraphs. Physical Review Letters [Editor's Suggestion] (2025).
• A. Kirkley, Transfer entropy for finite data. Physical Review E [Letter, Editor's Suggestion] (2025).
• S. Morel-Balbi and A. Kirkley, Bayesian regionalization of urban mobility networks. Physical Review Research (2024).
• A. Kirkley, Identifying hubs in directed networks. Physical Review E [Editor's Suggestion] (2024).
• T. P. Peixoto and A. Kirkley, Implicit models, latent compression, intrinsic biases, and cheap lunches in community detection. Physical Review E (2023).
• A. Kirkley, Spatial regionalization based on optimal information compression. Communications Physics (2022).
• A. Kirkley, G. T. Cantwell, and M. E. J. Newman, Belief propagation for networks with loops. Science Advances (2021).
• A. Kirkley, G. T. Cantwell, and M. E. J. Newman, Balance in signed networks. Physical Review E (2019).
• A. Kirkley, H. Barbosa, M. Barthelemy, and G. Ghoshal, From the betweenness centrality in street networks to structural invariants in random planar graphs. Nature Communications (2018).