CAREER: Theory and Applications of Complex Social Networks

Columbia University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

The primary aim of this project is to develop a unified theoretical framework for addressing network dynamics problems in the social sciences. A successful approach to the subject must necessarily be highly interdisciplinary, both intellectually and socially. The research itself draws upon techniques that are well established in physics, applied mathematics and computer science, but applies them to problems about which sociologiest and economists have much to teach their natural science counterparts: the large scale structure of social networks, potential differences in structure between new economy organizations and their industrial era predecessors; the contagion structure of viral epidemics, financial panics, or word-of-mouth recommendations. These problems and many others in economics and sociology exhibit complex network structure, as specified by the pattern of interactions between actors or agents in a distributed system such as a friendship network, a large firm or the international banking system. Although the study of social networks is more than 50 years old, the statistical analysis of large social and economic networks is only just becoming feasible, due to the recent, but rapidly increasing availability of large data sets and the computational capacity to analyze them. Further, the subtle relationship between a system's interaction structure and its global behavior has been largely overlooked by both economics and sociology. Thus the research proposed holds promise of fundamental contributions by uniting newly available data, newly enhanced computational methods and an interdisciplinary perspective. This focus provides considerable opportunity for interdisciplinary education as well as research. Thus this career proposal aims to integrate the cutting edge of network research into curriculum for specialists, as well as into general courses in complex systems and mathematical modeling that focus on applications in the social sciences.