Thursday, September 16, 2010 • 7:30 PM • James A. Little Theater, New Mexico School for the Deaf
Mark Newman University of Michigan, SFI External Faculty
Our Small World: How Networks of People and Information Shape Our World [Using Networks to Make Predictions]
There are some things we cannot measure – or we cannot measure them until it is too late. If we want to vaccinate against next year's flu, for instance, we cannot know for certain if a particular vaccination strategy will work until we get an actual flu outbreak. We cannot know for certain where the weak points are in a power grid until the outage happens that reveals them to us. In cases like these, the science of networks can help us build mathematical and computer models that can predict outcomes before they happen.