[Colloquium] Seminar Announcement: The Stories Networks Tell - Mon 11/14

[Ninfa Mayorga]

REMINDER

Computation Institute-Computational Knowledge Synthesis

Speaker: Carl T. Bergstrom, Department of Biology, University of Washington
Host: James Evans
Date: November 14, 2011 (Monday)
Time: 3:00 PM - 4:20 PM
Location: University of Chicago, Searle 240A, 5735 S. Ellis Avenue

The Stories Networks Tell

Abstract:
Networks have become essential representations in virtually all domains of the natural and social sciences. They provide a framework to record and manipulate large-scale data about the structure and function of multi-component systems with complex interactions among their distinct and differentiated parts. But as the scale of the systems that we study grows, our power to collect network data has outstripped our ability to comprehend those data in their raw form. We need tools and methods to extract the information implicit in large networks. We need ways to highlight and simplify the important features of networks while backgrounding the unimportant details. We need ways to study the patterns of change within networks over time. Drawing upon tools from network theory and mathematical information theory, our lab develops ways of revealing the stories that lie buried in huge network datasets. These tools are useful in analyzing systems ranging from trophic networks to the fed eral funds market to the structure of the internet, from gene regulatory networks to the global air transport network to international patterns of influenza transmission. Much of our work has focused on a model system of network information flow: the system of scientific communication itself, as recorded in approximately 35,000,000 citations among the articles in 7,000 scholarly journals published over the past decade . In this talk, I will explain how we can find the stories hidden in network data, and illustrate the approaches we have developed using examples drawn from our work on evaluating and mapping the structure of scientific communication. 


Further information:  http://octavia.zoology.washington.edu/


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