July 15, 2008

Announcement: ICDM Workshop on Analysis of Dynamic Networks

Since I'm pretty sure that part of the future of research on complex networks lays in understanding how networks evolve over time, this workshop seems quite relevant. Judging by the associated conference and the organizers, this workshop will probably focus on algorithmic techniques for analyzing large amounts of network data.

IEEE Conference on Data Mining (ICDM) Workshop on Analysis of Dynamic Networks (ADN)

December 19, 2008 at the IEEE Conference on Data Mining (ICDM) in Pisa, Italy

Organizers: Tanya Berger-Wolf (UIC), Malik Magdon-Ismail (RPI) and Jared Saia (UNM).

Description: The goal of the Analysis of Dynamic Networks (ADN) workshop is to bring together research that addresses explicitly the dynamic nature of networks in the context of analysis of social, electronic, biological and other networks. We aim to further the development of a computational framework in which one can model, discover and analyze complex interaction systems as they form and evolve.

We invite contributions presenting new computational methods for analysis of dynamic interaction networks, new models of dynamic behavior of networks, or applications of dynamic network analysis in various contexts. Papers presenting new methods should provide experimental or empirical evidence of the performance of the new methods.

In this context, submission topics can include, but are not limited to:
- Modeling dynamic behavior of networks

- Network structure prediction

- Analysis of spreading processes in networks

- Community structure inference

- Search and routing in dynamic networks

- Identification of critical nodes

- Comparison of dynamic networks

- Visualization of dynamic networks

Other topics within the subject area are welcome. Note, that all submitted papers should demonstrate the relevance to the topic of dynamic networks. If unsure whether your paper fits the session theme, please contact one of the co-chairs.

posted July 15, 2008 04:55 PM in Conferences and Workshops | permalink | Comments (0)

July 09, 2008

Announcement: DIMACS Workshop on Network Models of Biological and Social Contagion

This workshop looks pretty interesting, and that's not because it's being organized by my friends. Comfortably, the topics align with several of what I think are the "future" of network science (tip to Jake).

Update 18 July 2008: Having just received an invitation to speak from the organizers, I think it's likely that I'll be attending. In addition to learning about new science at DIMACS, it'll be a great opportunity to also visit some friends and colleagues in New York City.

DIMACS / DyDAn Workshop on Network Models of Biological and Social Contagion

November 3 - 4, 2008 at DIMACS, Rutgers

Organizers: Lauren Ancel Meyers (UT Austin) and Michelle Girvan (UMD).

Description: The spread of infectious diseases and the flow of ideas and information through populations fundamentally depend on the complex structure of the underlying network of interactions between individuals. Disease ecologists and sociologists have historically studied the dynamics of contagion using models that assume very simple population structures. Recently, however, network modeling has revolutionized both fields by enabling the rigorous exploration of the relationship between complex individual-level behavior and the higher-level emergence of outbreaks. The field draws on advanced statistical tools for inferring network structure from often limited data, data-driven algorithms for generating realistic network structures, and mathematical approximations for predicting transmission dynamics that draw from the methods of percolation theory and other fields within statistical physics.

While network models are more complex than their mass-action predecessors, they are remarkably tractable, often reducing to low-dimensional descriptions and allowing straightforward calculations of the dynamics of contagion. The fields of infectious disease epidemiology and sociology are simultaneously experiencing an explosion of computationally-intensive agent-based simulation models, that allow much higher-resolution representations of populations but often preclude comprehensive analysis. Selecting among the diversity of modeling approaches is non-trivial, and may be highly dependent on the system and the questions.

This workshop will focus on network models for biological and social contagion, and how they compare to alternative approaches. It will address the challenges of inferring network structure from sociological and/or epidemiological data, understanding the emergence of such network structure from simple individual-level behavior, and predicting the dynamics of contagion from simple characterizations of the underlying network.

Topics:

- Inferring network structure from data

- Generative models of social and epidemiological networks

- Modeling the dynamics of biological and social contagion on networks

- Modeling feedback from contagion dynamics to network structure

- Model selection -- choosing the right level of complexity

posted July 9, 2008 12:47 AM in Conferences and Workshops | permalink | Comments (0)

May 08, 2008

GATech Conference: Frontiers in Multi-Scale Systems Biology

Georgia Tech is getting into interdisciplinary science, at least when it comes to biology. Apparently, they're launching a new "institute" called the Integrative BioSystems Institute which is supposed to bring folks together from different biological disciplines to approach the big problems in biology (and by "biology", it seems that they mainly mean molecular and cellular biology, i.e., genes, proteins, metabolites, neurons, etc.). Anyway, to kick off their new center, they're throwing a big party, I mean, a big conference. The upside, of course, is that it should be chock full of speakers on a wide range of biological topics, and potentially a good place to learn about interesting questions.

GA Tech's Frontiers in Multi-Scale Systems Biology

October 18-21, 2008 at Georgian Terrace Hotel, Atlanta, GA

Organizers: Jeffrey Skolnick (Co-Chair), Eberhard Voit (Co-Chair), David Bader, Lynn Durham, Richard Fujimoto, Jessica Gilmore, Melissa Kemp, Patricia Sobecky, LaDawn Terry, Eric Vigoda.

Description: Frontiers in Multi-Scale Systems Biology will highlight representative topics of multi-scale systems biology including: genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, molecular inventories and databases, modeling and simulation, high-performance computing, enabling experimental and computational technologies, and applications in cancer, neuroscience and the environment.

Conference themes are
1. The creation of key molecular inventories that drive integrative biological systems analyses at all significant levels of biological organization.
2. Enabling experimental technologies for the investigation of multi-level, multi-scale integrative biological systems.
3. Innovation in high-performance computing, modeling and simulation, with applications in multi-scale integrative biology.
4. Applications of enabling experimental and computational technologies and molecular inventories.

posted May 8, 2008 06:18 PM in Conferences and Workshops | permalink | Comments (0)

February 24, 2008

IPAM Workshops: (1) River Networks and (2) the Internet

IPAM has two workshops coming up that look interesting.

The first is part of the Optimal Transport long program, and focuses on, among other things, resource transportation via network structures. Some of the impetus for this workshop stems from recent theoretical work on river networks (summarized well by Dan Rothman and Peter Dodds in a series of three review articles from 2000: 1, 2, and 3), which suggests that many of their complicated-looking structures are driven directly by properties of turbulent flows. My admittedly shallow dive through this literature a few years ago gives me the impression that the mathematical models being used are pretty cute, and may even by right. On the other hand, I'm not sure how good the empirical data and the statistical analyses are. Anyway... River networks, of course, are only distantly related to the kind of networks that I typically study, since they're basically shaped like trees rather than the complex hair balls I usually contemplate. But, they do make very beautiful, space-filling trees. While I was flying into PHL this afternoon, I couldn't help but notice the beautiful fractal-like structures carved into the wet lands by waterways of all sizes.

The second event at IPAM is a long program on the Internet and so-called "multi-resolution analysis" (MRA). I'm not sure the term MRA is a particularly helpful one, but generally the program seems to be focused on measurement and modeling of Internet structure and traffic, at and across different layers of the internet protocol stack. There are a lot of interesting questions involved here (e.g., check out Allen Downey's research), and in general, the idea behind a lot of this research is to help build a better Internet (i.e., it's ostensibly related to the enormously unfocused GENI project).

Workshop on Transport Systems in Geography, Geosciences, and Networks

May 5-9, 2008 at IPAM (UCLA)

Organizers: Andrea Bertozzi (UCLA), Bjorn Birnir (UC Santa Barbara), Dan Rothman (MIT), and William Zame (UCLA).

Description: In recent years a large number of scaling laws in geomorphology have been found to be equivalent to only two scaling laws. Recent results on river meanders indicate that there may be only one universal scaling law, implying all the others. Moreover, recent theoretical results on turbulent flow in rivers indicate that turbulent flow is the source of the universal scaling of river basins and river networks.

These results provide a key to the understanding of the fundamental structure of the surface of the earth, that layers of complexity such as tectonic uplift, earthquake rifts and the action of glaciers can then be added to. It provides a way of quantifying transport of water, sediments and chemicals over the surface and exchanges of dissolved chemicals between the water and the atmosphere. In particular this seems to provide a method to quantify the transfer of carbon dioxide from rivers to the atmosphere. This workshop will explore why and how this transport due to turbulent flow takes place and is optimal.

Other transport such as transport of magma in volcanoes will also be covered and how similar ideas can be used to identify and quantify transport in social networks and economics.

Internet Multi-Resolution Analysis: Foundations, Applications and Practice

September 8 - December 12, 2008 at IPAM (UCLA)

Organizers: Paul Barford (UW Madison), John Doyle (CalTech), Anna Gilbert (UMich), Mauro Maggioni (Duke), Craig Patridge (Bolt Beranek and Newman), Matthew Roughan (U. Adelaide), and Walter Willinger (AT&T).

Description: The main focus of this IPAM program will be on innovations and breakthroughs in the theoretical foundations and practical implementations of a network-centric multi-resolution analysis (MRA); that is, a structured approach to representing, analyzing, and visualizing complex measurements from Internet-like systems that is (i) specifically designed to accommodate the vertical (e.g., layers) and horizontal (e.g., domains) decompositions of Internet-like architectural designs, (ii) flexible enough to account for the highly heterogeneous (i.e., ``scale-rich'') nature of these designs and the high semantic content of the available measurements, and (iii) capable of retaining some of the mathematical elegance of more traditional MRA schemes. Critical capabilities of the envisioned Internet MRA, in particular, and network MRA, in general, include support for the exploration of multi-scale representations of very large and diverse network-specific annotated graph structures, novel techniques for the study of the dynamics of as well as the dynamic processes over these structures, and new methodologies and tools for dealing with aggregated spatio-temporal-functional network data representations and their associated analysis and visualization.

By leading the way towards the development of a mathematical foundation for network-centric MRA techniques, this IPAM program will be firmly grounded in a number of key Internet MRA target problems (e.g., cyber-security, traffic/network engineering, network control), with close ties to activities that can be expected to arise in the context of a major NSF-led initiative called Global Environment for Networking Innovations or GENI (www.cise.nsf.gov/geni or www.geni.net). At the same time, this IPAM program will also be strongly influenced by developments in other scientific disciplines where informed multiscale approaches to the study of highly engineered or evolved networked systems have proved to be essential for advancing our understanding of their properties, behaviors, and evolution.

• Workshop I: Multiscale Representation, Analysis and Modeling of Internet Data and Measurements. September 22 - 26, 2008.
• Workshop II: Applications of Internet MRA to Cyber-Security . October 13 - 17, 2008.
• Workshop III: Beyond Internet MRA: Networks of Networks. November 3 - 7, 2008.
• Workshop IV: New Mathematical Frontiers in Network Multi-Resolution Analysis. November 17 - 21, 2008.

posted February 24, 2008 03:26 PM in Conferences and Workshops | permalink | Comments (0)

January 07, 2008

Workshop: Is there a Physics of Society?

Usually, I blog about upcoming workshops and conferences that seem interesting (many of which I ultimately attend). This time, I'm blogging about a workshop that I'm organizing... whether that makes it interesting, I'll let you decide. The workshop is organized around the idea that social science and physics have a lot to offer each other, and many people over the ages have wondered whether society's machinations might follow "laws" that are vaguely similar to the sort that we see matter follow.

If there is a "physics of society" it will surely be rather different from the strongly deterministic laws that often characterize physics (in the classical limit), but rather more like the statistical laws that pervade condensed matter or statistical physics. Even then, if such "laws" do exist, they are necessarily the product of the collective action of many individuals, and thus don't say a whole lot about individual or idiosyncratic behavior. That is, "laws of society" in the sense that we mean them are different from traditional sociology, where most questions relate to how societal "norms" influence individual behavior (and also, perhaps, the construction of those norms), and more like "crowd" behavior when many people constrain each others' range of choices through social interactions. Examples of these kinds of patterns are plentiful nowadays, but some of my favorites include the physics of traffic jams (for example), the price of individuality (for example), and the irrationality of popularity (for example). Our hope for the workshop, which is bringing together about 10 social scientists and 10 physicists, is to think seriously about the prospects for a "physics of society", ask what other behaviors can be explained in this way, and shed light on the conditions that cause social interactions produce law-like behavior.

SFI Workshop: Is there a Physics of Society?

January 10-12, 2008 at Santa Fe Institute, New Mexico

Organizers: Aaron Clauset (SFI) and Michelle Girvan (U. Maryland)

Description: Based on the fact that a number of physicists are now actively studying models of social systems (e.g., the tremendous amount of recent work on networks, models of collective behavior, etc.), we believe that now is a critical time to bring together social scientists and physicists to discuss the idea of whether there might be a "physics of society," and, if so, what are the most promising areas for collaboration and future work. Obviously, we are optimistic about the likelihood that there are such areas, and hope that this workshop benefits both groups of scientists.

The format of the workshop will involve both technical presentations and discussion about the broader issues with the idea that we begin to sort through the outstanding questions about the 'physics of society'. The group we are inviting is relatively small of about twenty social scientists (including sociologists, economists and political scientists) and physicists.

Update, January 11, 2008: I'll be blogging about the results of the workshop next week.

Update, February 24, 2008: Obviously, I haven't blogged yet about the workshop the way I'd wanted to... this is partly because of having been overwhelmingly busy since the workshop ended, but also because I'm reluctant to kiss and tell about it here. There were aspects of the workshop that I greatly enjoyed (e.g., meeting several people whom I think are absolutely fascinating work, both on the social science and on the physics side of things), and aspects that greatly irked me (e.g., the thinly veiled and entirely unhelpful chest-thumping about physics is the model of how science should be done). For sure though, I hope and plan to have more interactions around the core ideas of the workshop in the future. With a little luck, some of these may even involve doing detailed experimental work on large-scale social behavior...

posted January 7, 2008 11:36 AM in Conferences and Workshops | permalink | Comments (3)

December 02, 2007

ISI Workshop: the summary

The talks at the Institute for Scientific Interchange's (ISI) workshop spanned quite a few areas of network research. One of the more popular themes (four talks) related to tag-networks, using data from places like Flickr, CiteULike and Bibsonomy, with much of the work presented being funded by an EU project called Tagora. The most interesting talk of this group was by Ciro Cattuto (abstract) on the semantics of tags. The thing I liked about this work was the use of known semantic relationships (constructed laboriously by human linguists) to infer the semantic relationships of the tags. This combination allowed them to constructed a system that seems to be able to identify a reasonable (to a human) set of synonyms to the tags a user gives a resource. Given the difficulty of algorithmically defining such semantic relations, this is a nice result.

Another good talk was by Filippo Menczer (abstract) on the behavior of web surfers as it relates to the simple model of behavior that PageRank (the basic algorithm that most modern search engines use) assumes. This idea is interesting on one level because you might imagine that you want search engine results to be based on an accurate model of user behavior. That is, you might want the search engine to give results equivalent to polling the world for its collective opinion about which page is most relevant to your query. But, as we know (from years of human-computer-interaction research), being realistic may not be the best way to build the most useable tool. In short, it may be the case that the "best" kind of search engine is one based on an inaccurate model of surfer behavior (obviously, the key here is knowing what "good" search results are).

Anyway, with that caveat in mind, Fil showed that several assumptions of the PageRank (or, more correctly, eigenvector centrality) are qualitatively inaccurate models of real user behavior. The first, that all edges have equal weight, is violated as users follow some links much more preferentially than others. Fil showed us the distribution of weights and claimed it was a power-law distribution. The fact that he used a logarithmic binning scheme makes this conclusion less believable, since a judicious choice of bins can make non-power-law distributions look more power-law-like (fortunately, there are better methods available). Similarly, the probability of a surfer "teleporting" to another page is typically assumed to be uniform among pages, but Fil showed us that some pages are much more likely to be "start" pages for a browsing session (the ones you would expect: Google, Yahoo, etc.). In a sense, these facts are unsurprising -- assuming that humans do anything uniformly at random almost always proves to be wrong -- but probably worth pointing out. I wonder if a version of eigenvector centrality, corrected for these differences in real user behavior, would be more useful as a basis for search engine results...

The third talk I really enjoyed was by Luca Dall'Asta (abstract) on his recent work generalizing some of my own work with Cris Moore on the bias of traceroute to multi-source studies. That is, it's now been known for a couple of years that when you sample a network's topology using short-path probes from a single source, you get a very biased view of the topology (so biased that the degree distribution of the real network may be concentrated around a single value, while the distribution of the sampled network has no characteristic value, i.e., looks like a power-law). A couple of years ago, Cris and I showed, using numerical studies, that the marginal utility of additional sources can be very low, and that almost all nodes need to be sources in the study before the observed network accurately represents the real one. Luca generalized our differential equations approach to multiple sources, and showed some very nice results for Erdos-Renyi random graphs (where every edge exists independently, but with the same probability). We talked briefly afterward about his preliminary results for random graphs with power-law degree distributions, and I'm hopeful that his approach can analytically explain the character of our numerical results.

The point of this kind of work is that most empirical data we have on network topology are actually derived from some kind of sampling scheme. That is, only in a few cases do we know the full network explicitly (e.g., the airport network). For the Internet (both the IP and the BGP), samples of the topology are derived from sampling paths through the network, and thus probably exhibit the kind of bias that Luca talked about. The ultimate goal here is to understand the bias well enough that we can invert the problem, converting a biased sample to an unbiased estimate of the underlying topology. This is a hard problem though, made worse by the fact that the sampling bias seems to map different underlying topologies to similar observed topologies. The importance of the Internet's topology may seem a bit esoteric, but similar kinds of biases exist in our samples of biological networks. Given the amount of interest in understanding the "systems-level" structure of things like the protein-interaction network (important if, say, you want to design drugs with few side-effects), you might imagine that there's a lot of work being done to understand (and invert) the sampling biases present there. But, sadly, you'd be wrong. On the other hand, the scale of the problem for the protein-interaction network is enormous: current estimates of our accuracy here suggest we only have 10% of the topology correct.

posted December 2, 2007 12:09 PM in Conferences and Workshops | permalink | Comments (1)

November 21, 2007

ISI Workshop: Theoretical Aspects and Models of Large Complex and Open Information Networks

This week I'm in Turino Italy at the Institute for Scientific Interchange's (ISI) Workshop on Theoretical Aspects and Models of Large Complex and Open Information Networks (TAMLCOIN). ISI occupies part of the Villa Gualino, an old WWII bunker-like complex on the hill that overlooks downtown Turin. Many of the researchers at ISI are involved in some aspect of complex networks research, so such a workshop seems entirely natural, and hopefully won't be the last. The workshop attendees are primarily the European side of the Atlantic (a strong presence from Italy, with some folks from Germany, France, Greece and Spain, among others), so it's a relatively different set of researchers than you see at the American networks meetings.

I'll try to do my usual conference-blogging about the interesting talks when I return to the US next week.

posted November 21, 2007 03:33 AM in Conferences and Workshops | permalink | Comments (0)

October 29, 2007

Conference: SIAM Annual Meeting 2008

The SIAM Annual Meeting for 2008 features networks ("Networks: biological, social and Internet") as one of the main themes. If this meeting is anything like the SIAM Dynamical Systems meeting in 2007, then there will be some interesting minisymposia on networks. The deadline for minisymposia proposals is 14 January, 2008. I'm not sure if you have to be a SIAM member to propose one.

SIAM Annual Meeting 2008

8 June, 2008 at San Diego, CA

Themes:

• Computational science & engineering
  
• Data mining
  
• Dynamical systems
  
• Geosciences
  
• Imaging science
  
• Linear & multilinear algebra
  
• Networks: biological, social and Internet
  
• Scientific software: enabling complex simulations
  

posted October 29, 2007 08:38 AM in Conferences and Workshops | permalink | Comments (0)

October 28, 2007

Workshop: NIPS Workshop on Statistical Models of Networks

NIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems, although in terms of topics, the N could probably be dropped without anyone noticing) has an interesting looking workshop coming up. Sadly, I think I will have to miss it, although there should be some interesting talks (Mark Handcock and Stephen Fienberg I know will give good ones), and it's hard to beat Whistler as a conference location.

NIPS Workshop on Statistical Models of Networks

December 8, 2007 at Whistler, Canada

Organizers: Lise Getoor (UMD), Raphael Gottardo (UBC), Kevin Murphy (UBC), and Eric Xing (CMU)

Description: The purpose of the workshop is to bring together people from different disciplines - computer science, statistics, biology, physics, social science, etc - to discuss foundational issues in the modeling of network and relational data. In particular, we hope to discuss various open research issues, such as:

• How to represent graphs at varying levels of abstraction, whose topology is potentially condition-specific and time-varying
• How to combine techniques from the graphical model structure learning community with techniques from the statistical network modeling community
• How to integrate relational data with other kinds of data (e.g., gene expression, sequence or text data).

posted October 28, 2007 08:33 AM in Conferences and Workshops | permalink | Comments (0)

September 26, 2007

Workshop: NSF + IPAM on CDI grant

IPAM is running a short workshop at the end of October to discuss a newly announced NSF program with the unfortunate name of "Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation" (or, CDI). Although its relationship to networks may not be obvious from the title, it seems clear to me (and to IPAM) that networks are going to be a big part of what CDI funds.

I think the general idea is to give NSF feedback about what are the interesting questions and topics in this area, and to let the community of interested folks get some feedback about what NSF is looking for. Seems like a reasonable idea to me, and could be a good opportunity to interact with both NSF and other folks interested in the grant.

Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation: Knowledge Extraction; October 29, 2007 at IPAM.

posted September 26, 2007 08:10 AM in Conferences and Workshops | permalink | Comments (0)

September 23, 2007

DIMACS Workshop on Computational Methods for Dynamic Interaction Networks

For the first part of this week I'm at Rutgers University giving a talk on analyzing dynamic social network data (really, dynamic proximity data from which you can infer network data) at a DIMACS workshop run in part by Tanya Berger-Wolf (now at UIC; I first met her when she was a post-doc at UNM). Some of the presentations overlap with those I saw at another DIMACS workshop back in January at GA Tech, but I hope the emphasis in this event will be more on dynamic (i.e., temporally varying) networks, and some of the interesting questions you can answer computationally with that kind of data.

Then, I'll be spending the rest of the week in New York City thinking about science with Chris and Jake at Columbia.

posted September 23, 2007 09:24 PM in Conferences and Workshops | permalink | Comments (0)

September 11, 2007

Announcement: NetSci 2008

It seems like NetSci is gaining some momentum as an annual thing, and this seems like good news to me. I hope this also means that the conference will exhibit greater diversity in the speakers, which in the past has tilted heavily toward the past and present collaborators of the organizers. The bad news for State-siders like me is that NetSci 2008 is going to be in the UK, which makes attending a little more complicated (actually, the last I'd heard, it was going to be in Italy). The website has scant details at the moment, so I will probably post again about this conference closer to the submission deadline.

International Conference on Network Science 2008 (NetSci)

June 25 - 27, 2008 at Norwich BioSciences Conference Centre, Norwich, UK

Organizers: Norwich BioSciences Conference Centre and David White (Institute of Food Research, IFR), József Baranyi (IFR), Guido Caldarelli (University of Rome), Zoltán Toroczkai (Notre Dame), and Albert-László Barabási (Notre Dame).

posted September 11, 2007 10:06 AM in Conferences and Workshops | permalink | Comments (0)

August 16, 2007

Announcement: IPAM Social Data Mining and Knowledge Building Workshop

This sounds interesting. Also, Andrew McCallum is a very smart guy.

Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM; UCLA) Social Data Mining and Knowledge Building

November 5 - 9, 2007 at IPAM, UCLA, Los Angeles

Organizers: Peter Jones (Yale), Johan Bollen (LANL), Ronald Coifman (Yale), Andrew McCallum (UMass-Amherst), and Karin Verspoor (LANL).

Description: Social Data Mining is a fast-growing and exciting area of inquiry, in which connections among and interactions between individuals are analyzed to understand innovation, collective decision making, and problem solving, and how the structure of organizations and social networks impacts these processes. Analysis of such inherently relational datasets is currently being applied in e-commerce to drive recommendation systems, in bibliometrics to describe patterns of publication and determine the influence of specific individuals, in security environments to understand the structure of terrorist or gang networks, and numerous other areas. This workshop will bring together researchers in mathematics, computer science, and the social sciences to explore the following topics:

• collective decision making
• social network analysis
• social mapping and bibliometrics
• the role of information visualization in understanding social networks
• the application of graph-theoretical analysis to social networks
• data representation strategies, e.g. the Semantic Web

posted August 16, 2007 12:48 PM in Conferences and Workshops | permalink | Comments (0)

August 03, 2007

Announcement: Workshop on Theoretical Aspects and Models of Large Complex and Open Information Networks

I recently received an invitation to speak at this workshop; my intention is to attend, but this kind of depends on whether the US Government can get me my new passport in time. Regular readers will recall that back in April I suffered the unspeakable tragedy of having my laptop (and bag, with contents) stolen. For a completely stupid reason, my passport was in the bag, and I only just recently got around to sending off the application for a replacement. I must admit, I'm extremely excited about getting a new RFID-enabled passport though. Just think about all the time I could save in customs if officials could scan my passport from a distance!

Anyway, on to the real business of this post...

The Institute for Scientific Interchange (ISI; in Torino, Italy) Workshop on Theoretical Aspects and Models of Large Complex and Open Information Networks

November 19 - 21, 2007 at the ISI Foundation, Villa Gualino, Torino Italy

Organizers: Allain Barrat (Paris-Sud and ISI), Josep Diaz (Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya), Lefteris Kirousis (Computer Technology Institute, Patras, Greece), and Alessandro Vespignani (Indiana U. and ISI).

Description: Large, Complex and Open Information Networks consist of many interacting nodes, and have been shown to possess emerging properties such as the small-world character or the widespread heterogeneity of the connectivity.

Research in network theory includes many different aspects. New tools have been developed for the analysis and description of the topology of networks. New models have aimed at understanding how self-organization is realized and how local decisions concerning connectivity among nodes affect the global emergent properties of such networks, like percolation, clustering, critical exponents etc.
Moreover, complex networks are most often the substrate of many dynamical process that can be of critical importance. For example, biological networks carry out vital functions, the Internet is the support of many different information transfer networks, while social networks are the environment in which epidemics, rumors, fads or opinions propagate. Finally, attention has been recently been devoted to the dynamical nature of networks, whose topology can be influenced by the dynamical process of which it is the support.

The scope of this workshop is to foster interaction among researchers interested in these various aspects of network science, and to encourage interdisciplinary approaches (for example, from the point of view of complex systems, computer science, statistical mechanics, discrete mathematics, biology and others).

posted August 3, 2007 02:36 PM in Conferences and Workshops | permalink | Comments (0)

June 29, 2007

Announcement: DIMACS/DyDAn Workshop on Computational Methods for Dynamic Interaction Networks

While chatting recently with Martin Rosvall, I realized that it might actually be useful (gasp!) if I were to post information about workshops and conferences on complex networks that I hear about. So, in the interest of having this blog serve at least one additional purpose other than being my own personal bully pulpit, I'll try to post announcements as I receive them. Also, to those of you who are plugged into these things, you could help out by sending me your own workshop and conference announcements.

Without further ado, here's the first of the bunch coming up in the Fall. The paper submission deadline is already upon us (Sunday, July 1st) but DIMACS has a good track record of running good workshops, so maybe some folks will find it worthwhile to attend. Update 29 June: Deadline has been extended to July 8th, and I'm told there will be some support available for junior folks to attend.

DIMACS / DyDAn Workshop on Computational Methods for Dynamic Interaction Networks

September 24 - 25, 2007 at the DIMACS Center, CoRE Building, Rutgers University

Organizers: Tanya Berger-Wolf (UIUC), Mark Goldberg (RPI), Malik Magdon-Ismail (RPI), Fred Roberts (DIMACS) and William "Al" Wallace (RPI).

Description: A substantial body of research in various sciences aims at understanding the dynamics and patterns of interactions within populations, in particular how social groups arise and evolve. As a result of the advances in communications and computing technology, extreme amounts of data are being accumulated representing the evolution of large scale communication networks, such as the WWW, chatrooms, Blogs, and networks of bluetooth enabled handheld devices. Moreover, as small sensors become largely available and affordable, new research areas are exploiting the social networks resulting from those sensor networks data. Finding patterns of social interaction within a population has been addressed in a wide range applications including: disease modeling cultural and information transmission, intelligence and surveillance, business management, conservation biology and behavioral ecology.

The workshop will focus on two complementary themes. On one hand it will address the emerging importance of electronic communication networks, their social implications and how those facilitate the organization and coordination of activities of social groups. The second theme of the workshop is adapting and extending the computational methods developed in the context of communication and computer networks to the social interaction networks.

Topics:

• Modeling and simulation of dynamic social networks
• Measurement and comparison of dynamic social networks
• Community and social structure identification
• Identification of individual roles and behavioral patterns
• Visualization of large dynamic networks

Update 13 August: Here is the program. I'll be presenting a paper at this workshop entitled "Persistence and periodicity in a dynamic proximity network", which is joint work with Nathan Eagle (currently of MIT, but soon to be joining SFI), and considers the real-time dynamics of a human proximity network.

posted June 29, 2007 02:08 PM in Conferences and Workshops | permalink | Comments (0)