DYNAMICS ON AND OF COMPLEX NETWORKS VI

A Satellite Workshop of European Conference on Complex Systems, 2013

Barcelona, Spain, September 18, 2013.


Aim

"Network Science" has recently attracted the attention of a large number of researchers from across various disciplines, mainly due to its ubiquitous applicability in modeling the structure and dynamics of large-scale complex systems (both natural and man-made). Examples of such systems, exhibiting complex interaction patterns among their constituent entities, range from genetic pathways and ecological networks to the WWW, peer-to-peer networks, and blogs and online web-social networks (such as Facebook, Orkut and Twitter).

For the past five years, the primary aim of the series of workshops "Dynamics on and of Complex Networks", held as a satellite meeting of the European Conference on Complex Systems, has been to explore the (statistical) dynamics on and of such complex networks. Dynamics on networks refers to the different types of so called processes (e.g. proliferation, diffusion etc.) that take place on networks. The functionality/efficiency of such processes is strongly affected by the topology as well as the dynamic behavior of the network. On the other hand, Dynamics of networks mainly refers to various phenomena (for instance self-organization, evolutionary clustering) that go on in order to bring about certain changes in the topology of the network.

It has become clear from the past series of DOOCN workshops that modeling dynamical networks such as dynamic trafficking networks or telephone/human communication networks have gained enormous importance. However, in the constantly changing modern world, there is an urgent need to understand problems related to systems that dynamically evolve in either structurally or functionally, or both. One such important area is semiotic dynamics – how communication systems dynamically evolve over time, how opinions/shared conventions emerge in dynamically changing social media, how collaborative tagging systems function etc. Consequently, this year the workshop will focus on this particular theme, i.e., "Semiotic dynamics in time-varying social media".

Some of the topics covered within the umbrella of the workshop are:
  1. Opinion formation in dynamic social media
  2. Consensus formation and emergence of language-like phenomena
  3. Dynamical properties of collaborative tagging systems
  4. Algorithms to collect time-varying network data from online social media
  5. Sampling limitations/problems for quantitative-modeling of empirical data
  6. Metrics and statistics to identify change in dynamic networks
  7. Developing and testing theory for dynamic network evolution, adaptation and decay
  8. Methods to forecast changes in existing networks
  9. Distributed detection over time varying networks
  10. Estimating time-varying networks
  11. Ranking time-varying Networks
  12. Search in a time-varying social network
  13. Algorithms to track groups/communities in time-varying networks
  14. Methods to investigate attack tolerance in time-varying networks
  15. Empirical studies of multi-mode, multi-link and multi-time period networks
  16. Algorithms to visualize time-varying networks
  17. Walking and searching in time-varying networks
  18. Co-community Structure in time-varying Networks
  19. Virus propagation/ information/innovations/ideas spreading on time-varying networks
  20. Dynamical and structural robustness/stability in time-varying social networks
  21. Language/culture change and it's roots/interactions in/with time-varying social networks
  22. Addressing collective behaviors with agent-based models
A closer inspection would make it clear that the issues and the related problems in this area are still very loosely defined. The primary objective of this interdisciplinary workshop would be to tie these loose ends and concretize the problems that need to be urgently addressed through intensive discussions among the expert scientists in this area. In this line, this workshop will provide a platform for the convergence of multi-disciplinary research contributions that combine methods from computer science, statistical physics, econometrics and social network theory towards modeling time varying social, semiotic and information systems. In addition, this may be an opportunity to get familiar with the cutting-edge research contributions exploring key issues, challenges, and characteristics of dynamical networks that emerge in various complex systems.

You can register for the workshop as well as the main conference at http://www.eccs13.eu/index.php/registration