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!

LaNeT-vi, a program that represents large-scale networks in two-dimensions, was used to create the cover image for the November edition of Nature Physics. The featured image highlights several nodes in the foreground that stand out from the rest of the network, highlighting the main thrust of the journal’s cover story; the most efficient spreaders in a network are not necessarily the most connected or central. Instead, efficient spreading correlates with spreader location within the core of the network as determined by the k-shell decomposition analysis.

Determining what makes an efficient spreader in a network is essential for optimizing network efficiency and the deployment of resources. As a publicly-available online tool, LaNeT-vi assists in this effort by allowing users to upload their own networks and receive original renderings of their information based on the k-core decomposition.

LaNeT-vi was developed in-house at the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University in collaboration with the CNRS, France and the CONICET in Argentina.