This week we had the Master Thesis defense, for students graduating in the CS program at the University of Tsukuba. There are about 140 defenses total, and I was invited to be a member of the committee for 8 of those. While I was reading the theses in preparation, I got curious about which professors invited which other professors for the thesis committees, and I drew the graph below, using the NetworkX python library:

This is a directed graph where an edge from professor A to professor B means that professor A asked B to be a part of the thesis committee for one of their students. There are some multi-edges (professor A inviting professor B for multiple committees), but I did not put that in the graph. The data is there, though.

To be frank, this graph is pretty much illegible, but if you squint the right way you could see some clusters around similar research areas (HW professors inviting other hardware professors in their committees), as well as more cross-disciplinary researchers who are invited for committees of several different groups.

I tried a bit to change the code that produced this image to make it more legible, without much success. Suggestions are welcome! I also asked a Network Science professor if they had any recommendation, and they told me that they had actually done something very similar 5 years ago. That was a nice bonding moment.