Events — Colloquia & Seminars
High Performance Computational Network Science: Epidemics in Social and Wireless Networks
Speaker: Madhav Marathe, Virginia Tech
Date: Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Talk: 11:00 AM, 366 WVH
Abstract
Complex Networks are pervasive in our society. Realistic biological,information, social and technical networks share a number of unique features that distinguish them from physical networks. Examples of such features include: irregularity, time-varying structure, heterogeneity among individual components and selfish/cooperative game-like behavior by individual components. Furthermore, the network structure, the dynamical process on the network and the behavior of constituent agents co-evolve over time. The size and heterogeneity of these networks, their co-evolving nature and the technical difficulties in applying dimension reduction techniques commonly used to analyze physical systems makes reasoning, prediction and controlling of these networks even more challenging.
Recent quantitative changes in high performance and pervasive computing including faster machines, distributed sensors and service-oriented software have created new opportunities for collecting, integrating,analyzing and accessing information related to such large complex networks. The advances in network and information science that build on this new capability provide entirely new ways for reasoning and controlling these networks. Together, they enhance our ability to formulate,analyze and realize novel public policies pertaining to these complex networks.
The talk will focus on elements of network and information science required to support policy informatics as it pertains to epidemic processes in social and wireless networks. Understanding these epidemiological processes is of immense societal importance. Additionally they serve as excellent "model organisms" for developing a theory of co-evolving complex networks. Perhaps more intriguing, recent advances in wireless communications provide compelling reasons for studying these networks together. I will discuss this possibility in my concluding remarks.
Brief Biography
Madhav V. Marathe is the Deputy Director of the Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory and a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Virginia Bio-Informatics Institute at Virgina Tech. Prior to joining Virginia Tech, he was the team leader in the Basic and Applied Simulation Science group, Computer and Computational Sciences at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He obtained his B.Tech in CS from IIT Chennai in 1989 and a Ph.D. in CS in 1994 from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Albany.