I might be going to this, because it’s in the neighbourhood and I suppose I ought to see what colourful examples other people use in these situations, having given similar talks a couple times myself.

MIT Physics Department Colloquium: Jennifer Chayes

“Interdisciplinarity in the Age of Networks”

Everywhere we turn these days, we find that dynamical random networks have become increasingly appropriate descriptions of relevant interactions. In the high tech world, we see mobile networks, the Internet, the World Wide Web, and a variety of online social networks. In economics, we are increasingly experiencing both the positive and negative effects of a global networked economy. In epidemiology, we find disease spreading over our ever growing social networks, complicated by mutation of the disease agents. In problems of world health, distribution of limited resources, such as water, quickly becomes a problem of finding the optimal network for resource allocation. In biomedical research, we are beginning to understand the structure of gene regulatory networks, with the prospect of using this understanding to manage the many diseases caused by gene mis-regulation. In this talk, I look quite generally at some of the models we are using to describe these networks, and at some of the methods we are developing to indirectly infer network structure from measured data. In particular, I will discuss models and techniques which cut across many disciplinary boundaries.

9 September 2010, 16:15 o’clock, Room 10-250.