University Homepage School Homepage School Contacts School Search

This page collects the material, slides, links, papers, etc that we will use for the 2010 MAN course, which is an introduction to the mathematical aspects of network theory, and various cases were such techniques can be seen to be relevant, notably social networks, markets, and diffusion processes (epidemiology, innovation etc).

See the timetable here. The first course in Sep 20.

The bulk of the course will be based on the following on-line book.

As a starter read:
- this recent article on mining social networks,
- this other one on the networked dominos of public debt in the eurozone (check the debt graph in particular)
- this general short paper on why model
- watch this nice little movie illustrating the rich-get-richer principle (also known as preferential attachment, or cumulative advantage; the diameter of a node is proportional to its degree, and so is the probability that a new node will bind it).

Dec 10 workshop on networks at the Informatics Forum in room G07a; slides.

Classes:
- Markets and Beliefs (Chap. 22) (revised version Sep 30)
- Epidemics (Chap. 21) (revised Oct 7)
- Random graphs, criticality (this is a complement to the book)
- Oct 21: guest lecture from Miguel Lurgi on Ecological networks.
- No class on Oct 25!
- Oct 28: Prediction markets; you can check this or this more elaborate paper on Artificial Prediction Markets
- Nov 1: second guest lecture from Miguel Lurgi on Ecological networks.
- Nov 4: Prediction markets (II) slides.
- Nov 8, 11, 15, 18: Communities, Girvan-Newman's algorithm slides (revised Nov 18).
- Nov 22: guest lecture from David Pugh on the Schelling Segregation model.
- Nov 25: social influence on facebook slides
- Nov 29, Dec 1: revisions.

Course work (to be returned by Jan 12; new deadline!): exercises from the Easley-Kleinberg book: 3.7.1 to 3.7.5, 22.11.1 and 22.11.2.