Keynote Speaker

Mark Newman, University of Michigan

Epidemics, Erdos numbers, and the Internet: The structure and function of complex networks

There are networks in almost every part of our lives. Some of them are familiar and obvious: the Internet, the power grid, the road network. Others are less obvious but just as important: the patterns of friendships or acquaintances between people form a social network; the species in an ecosystem join together to form a food web; the workings of the body's cells are dictated by a metabolic network of chemical reactions. As large-scale data on these networks and others have become available in the last few years, a new science of networks has grown up, drawing on ideas from math, engineering, biology, physics and other fields to shed light on systems ranging from bacteria to the whole of human society. This lecture will look at some new disoveries regarding networks, how these discoveries were made, and what they can tell us about the way the world works.

About the Speaker

Mark Newman is the Paul Dirac Collegiate Professor of Physics at the University of Michigan. He is affiliated with the department of physics and the Center for the Study of Complex Systems. His research focuses on the structure and function of networks. These include scientific coauthorship networks, citation networks, email networks, friendship networks, epidemiological contact networks, and animal social networks. He has investigated fundamental network properties such as degree distributions, centrality measures, assortative mixing, vertex similarity, and community structure. He has also made analytic or computer models of disease propagation, friendship formation, the spread of computer viruses, the Internet, and network navigation algorithms. For more information, visit his website.