Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research

Professor Vespignani

Alessandro Vespignani, Professor of Informatics, Associate Director of the Pervasive Technology Institute Digital Science Center and Director of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research (CNetS) will give a talk on how physics and computers are working together to fight global pandemics like the H1N1 flu virus at the Indiana University Open House to be held on Saturday, October 31st by the IU Departments of Physics and Astronomy. His talk titled “Planning for the H1N1 flu – How physics and computers help to fight off global pandemics” will commence at 12.30 p.m. The event, set from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. taking place at Swain Hall West, 727 E. Third St., will also include guided tours of the IU Cyclotron Facility (IUCF) and the Kirkwood Observatory, along with designed-for-the-public lectures from astronomy Professor Emeritus Martin Burkhead and School of Informatics Professor Alessandro Vespignani. The attendance for this exciting event is free for all ages. More…

Channel 13 video

A report on the popularity of Twitter at IU (which ranks among the top 10 universities on a number of metrics) has sparked some interest in the local media about work CNetS researchers are going on Twitter usage. An interview with Filippo Menczer, associate director of CNetS, appeared on the front page of the Herald-Times on Oct 16, 2009. Indianapolis NBC affiliate Channel 13 interviewed Menczer and CNetS postdoc Bruno Gonçalves for their news program that night. The story was also picked up by the Chicago Tribune, US News & World Report, The Republic, Indianapolis Star, NewsDay, Courier-Journal, Indianapolis Business Journal, News-Sentinel, WIBC, The Indy Channel, WHAS, Journal & Courier, Palladium-Item, Star Press, and IDS.

Professor Vespignani speaks on H1N1 vaccine

As Hoosiers roll up their sleeves to take the seasonal flu shots, researchers state that the H1N1 vaccination may take longer to arrive for large scale inoculation than anticipated. “It’s a race against time,” said IU School of Informatics professor Dr. Alessandro Vespignani who was on his way to an H1N1 conference Tuesday. He says by the time the vaccine is widely available, “it’s likely to have the peak of the disease earlier than an appreciable percentage of the population will be vaccinated.” He believes the H1N1 virus should hit its peak by about Halloween. By then, half of those who are going to get ill will have gotten sick, and only then will large supplies be available. “There is no need to panic. The disease is mild, it is under the constant attention of authorities,” Dr. Vespignani said. More…

Alessandro Vespignani, an associate director of the Pervasive Technology Institute Digital Science Center and director of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research (CNetS) will serve on the editorial board of the new Journal of Computational Science (JoCS).

JoCS is an Elsevier Science Journal for novel results in computational science edited by P.M.A. Sloot. The journal aims to be an international platform to exchange novel research results in simulation based science across all scientific disciplines. It publishes advanced innovative, interdisciplinary research where complex multi-scale, multi-domain problems in science and engineering are solved, integrating sophisticated numerical methods, computation, data, networks, and novel devices.

JoCS is now accepting submissions, including full papers, short reports and letters. For more information and submission guidelines visit: www.elsevier.com/locate/jocs.

Cognitive scientists at Indiana University Bloomington received a five-year, $3.1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to create and employ innovative methods for training future scientists.

According to the NSF, the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program is intended to “catalyze a cultural change in graduate education” with innovative new models for graduate education and training that transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries. More…

Much as meteorologists predict the path and intensity of hurricanes, CNetS’ Alessandro Vespignani believes we will one day predict with unprecedented foresight, specificity and scale such things as the economic and social effects of billions of new Internet users in China and India, or the exact location and number of airline flights to cancel around the world in order to halt the spread of a pandemic. In the July 24 “Perspectives” section of the journal Science, Vespignani writes that advances in complex networks theory and modeling, along with access to new data, will enable humans to achieve true predictive power in areas never before imagined. This capability will be realized as the one wild card in the mix — the social behavior of large aggregates of humans — becomes more definable through progress in data gathering, new informatics tools and increases in computational power. More…

It’s a terrifying word. But what does it really mean? The outbreak of H1N1 is the latest deadly global battle between man and virus. As we learn more about how viruses mutate, an international effort is underway to vanquish humanity’s most lethal foes. CNetS’ Alessandro Vespignani to appear on Science Channel program about the “global battle between man and virus”.

Fil Menczer is one of the organizers of Hypertext 2009, the 20th ACM Conference on Hypertext an Hypermedia. The conference will be held June 29-July 1 at the Villa Gualino Convention Centre, on the hills overlooking Torino, Italy. Hypertext is the main venue for high quality peer-reviewed research on “linking.” The Web, the Semantic Web, the Web 2.0, and Social Networks are all manifestations of the success of the link. With a 70% increase in submissions, Hypertext 2009 will have a strong and diverse technical program covering all research concerning links: their semantics, their presentation, the applications, as well as the knowledge that can be derived from their analysis and their effects on society. The conference will also feature demos, posters, a student research competition, four workshops, and keynotes by Lada Adamic and Ricardo Baeza-Yates.

Similarity Cloud for 'mac' vs 'pc'

Alessandro Flammini and Filippo Menczer, along with M. Ángeles Serrano from the University of Barcelona, have authored a paper entitled “Modeling Statistical Properties of Written Text” that has been published in the PLoS One. The paper introduces and validates a generative model that explains from simple rules the simultaneous emergence of patterns of written text observed in many languages. The paper focuses on the well-known Zipf’s law of word frequencies, as well as additional patterns such as Heaps’ law of word diversity, the bursty nature of rare words, and similarity among documents. Through their model, the researchers found a connection between word burstiness and the topicality of text. In addition, they identify dynamic word ranking and memory across documents as key mechanisms to explain the organization of written text. The semantic similarity between topics, which is one of the features that the model aims to explain, is visualized by the Similarity Cloud, an online tool developed by computer science graduate student Mark Meiss. The model developed by the researchers and the findings of this paper could lead to improved techniques for identifying key terms that capture the topics of a Web page, which is crucial for matching search queries to relevant results and ads. More…

GLEaM is a Global Epidemic and Mobility modeler that integrates sociodemographic and population mobility data in spatially structured stochastic disease models to simulate the spread of epidemics at the worldwide scale. The GLEaM team and its PI, Alex Vespignani, have been featured in many news reports about projections of the spread of H1N1 (Mexican flu). Read more about GLEaM…