| Spring 2006 UMASS
Amherst Operations Research / Management Science Seminar Series |
Date: Friday, March 17, 2006 Time: 11:00 AM Location: Isenberg School of Management, Room 112 |
| Speaker: Professor Albert-László Bárabasi Department of Physics University Notre Dame Notre Dame, IN |
| Biography: Albert-László
Barabási is the Emil T. Hofman Professor of Physics at the
University of Notre Dame. Born in Transylvania, and educated in
Bucharest and Budapest, he received a PhD in physics in 1994 from
Boston University. After spending a year at IBM's T.J. Watson Research
Center he joined the Notre Dame faculty in 1995. His research has led
to the discovery and understanding of scale-free networks, describing
many complex networks in technology and nature, from the World Wide Web
to the cell. His current research focuses on applying the concepts
developed by his group for characterizing the topology of the WWW and
the Internet to uncover the structural and topological properties of
complex metabolic and genetic networks. He is the recipient of the FEBS
Anniversary Award in Systems Biology (2005) and the author of the
recent general-audience book Linked:
The New Science of Networks (Perseus, 2002), currently available
in ten languages. |
| TITLE: The architecture of real
networks: from the Web to social networks |
| Abstract: Networks with complex topology
describe systems as diverse as the society, cell, or the World Wide
Web. The emergence of most networks is driven by self-organizing
processes that are governed by simple but generic laws. The analysis of
social, biological and technological systems shows that nature and
human designs share the same large-scale topology, and are governed by
similar evolutionary laws. I will show that the structure of these
complex webs have important consequences on their robustness against
failures and attacks, with implications on drug design, the Internet's
ability to survive attacks and failures, and the ability of ideas and
innovations to spread on the network. |
| This series is organized by the
UMASS Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter. Support for this series is
provided by the Isenberg School of Management, the Department of
Finance and Operations Management, INFORMS, and the John F. Smith
Memorial Fund. The Chapter wishes to thank Professor Anna Nagurney, its
Faculty Advisor, for her help and support of this series. For questions, please contact the INFORMS Student Chapter Representative, Ms. Tina Wakolbinger, wakolbinger@som.umass.edu |