Network Science Seminar

Introduction

Complex networks from the Internet to various (online) social networks have a huge impact on our lives and it is thus an important research challenge to understand these networks and the forces that shape them. The emergence of the Internet has kindled the interdisciplinary field of Network Science, which is devoted to analyzing and understanding real-world networks.

Extensive research on real-world networks from many different domains like communication networks, social networks, protein-protein interaction networks, neural networks, etc. has revealed that many of these networks are similar in the sense that they share basic properties.

A typical example having all basic properties is the depicted snapshot of the AS-level graph of the Internet. Every node is an autonomous system and links exist if the corresponding ASs have a peering agreement for routing data between their respective sub-networks. The data was obtained from the Stanford Large Network Data Collection.

The depicted network has the so-called small-world property, i.e. it has a small diameter and small average distances. The degree distribution of the nodes follows a power-law, i.e. nodes' degrees are heterogeneous and there are many nodes with small degree and a few nodes with very high degree. (The size of the nodes in the network is depicted proportional to their degree.) Moreover, the network has high clustering, i.e. it has an abundance of small cliques and triangles.

 

The goal of this seminar is to introduce and explore the exciting field of Network Science. We will discuss the core properties of real-world networks and possible scientific explanations, i.e. generative models, of them. We will study broad range of models ranging from purely random graphs to game-theoretic approaches. Along the way we will also discuss some standard tools for analyzing real-world networks.   

Prerequisites

The seminar has no strict prerequisites. However, it is helpful to be somewhat fluent in Graph Theory and Mathematics in general.

Ansprechpartner

Prof. Dr. Pascal Lenzner
Lehrstuhlinhaber
Lehrstuhl für Theoretische Informatik

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