The Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research (CNetS) is part of the School of Informatics and Computing and the Pervasive Technology Institute of Indiana University. The center supports and enhances the research efforts of the complex systems group, which has been active within the School since 2004. CNetS is meant to foster interdisciplinary research in all areas related to complex networks and systems. On this website you can find information on CNetS faculty, research groups, and their activities.

News

University and industry scientists are determining how to forecast significant societal events, ranging from violent protests to nationwide credit-rate crashes, by analyzing the billions of pieces of information in the ocean of public communications, such as tweets, web queries, oil prices, and daily stock market activity.

“We are automating the generation of alerts, so that intelligence analysts can focus on interpreting the discoveries rather than on the mechanics of integrating information,” said Naren Ramakrishnan, the Thomas L. Phillips Professor of Engineering in the computer science department at Virginia Tech. He is leading the team of computer scientists and subject-matter experts from Virginia Tech, the University of Maryland, Cornell University, Children’s Hospital of Boston, San Diego State University, University of California at San Diego, and Indiana University, and from the companies, CACI International Inc., and Basis Technology.

CNetS Professors Bollen and Rocha from the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University are members of this project. Prof. Bollen, has devised a way to evaluate the tone of tweets – calm, alert, vital, etc. — to predict stock market trends. Prof. Rocha, has developed bio-inspired methods to predict associations in biochemical, social, and knowledge networks, including web and e-mail systems.

Additional details: Researchers study new ways to forecast critical societal events.

Ruby

Emilio

We welcome two postdoctoral associates who just joined our center. Ruby Wang got her PhD in Physics from Central China Normal University in 2009. Emilio Ferrara got his PhD in Mathematics (Computer Science) from the University of Messina in Italy in 2012. Both will work on projects related to the diffusion of information in social media and social networks.

In February 2012 CNetS joins WSTNet, an international network bringing together world-class research laboratories to support the Web Science research and education program. The Web Science Network of Laboratories combines some of the world’s leading academic researchers in Web Science, with  academic programs that enhance the already growing influence of Web Science. The member labs, from institutions that also include USC, MIT, Northwestern, Oxford, and Southampton among others, provide valuable support for the ongoing development of Web Science. Contributions from the labs include the organization and hosting of summer schools, workshops and meetings, including the WebSci conference series.

We are excited to welcome a new faculty member, Yong-Yeol “YY” Ahn, to our center. Prior to joining IU, YY was a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Complex Network Research at Northeastern University and a visiting researcher at the Center for Cancer Systems Biology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, working with Albert-László Barabási. YY has a PhD in Physics from KAIST in Korea. His work explores  the structure and dynamics of complex systems, spanning from molecules to society.

YY has been selected by the Association of Korean Physicists in America as one of the two winners of the annual Outstanding Young Researcher Award. And to top it off, his paper on Flavor network and the principles of food pairing was the most downloaded of all Nature.com in December 2011. Congratulations!

Prof. Flammini (PI) and Menczer have been awarded a three-year, $2M grant from DARPA in the context of the Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program, whose primary goal is “to develop a new science of social networks built on an emerging technology base,” Our IU unit leads a three-group team that includes collaborators at Lockheed-Martin Advanced Technology Lab and the University of Michigan. The funded project is aimed at designing and implementing a system to detect online persuasion campaigns.