Conference

I just returned from Aveiro, the northern Portuguese city that held the CNET 2004 International Conference on the “Science of Complex Networks: from Biology, to the Internet and WWW”. Albert Barabasi was the first lecturer and besides being always interesting to put a face and a voice to someone who’s work I’ve been analyzing for so long, most of his lecture was a mere resume of his latest book. However, he did mention, in the last third of his lecture, an interesting approach to the visual study of complex networks. Barabasi has lately been researching, mapping and calculating the number of subgraphs in complex networks and how they relate to each other. By knowing that subgraphs do not exist in isolation and they must aggregate into subgraph clusters, Barabasi has been mapping all possible clusters that are an integral part of the network. These visual Motifs are subgraphs that have significantly higher density in the real network than in the randomized version of it.

In my next entry I will come back to the Motifs subject because it is extremely interesting. Besides Barabasi there were many engaging lectures that reached many topics, from food web networks, to packet switching networks, evolutionary design of functional networks, protein interaction network maps, traffic networks, gene networks, emergence of social beliefs in human networks, communities emergence, molecular motors and predicting epidemics development in small world models. A sentence by Alexander Mikhailov that kept in my mind the all time: “Network structure determines the performance of the network".

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