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Hello all!
I don't know if my course responds to what Christina has asked but I
should say about my Networks course at a beginning graduate level:
readings are at:
http://nicomedia.math.upatras.gr/courses/mnets/index_en.html
As currently I happen to be at a Math Dept, you might realize that the
flavor of the course is beyond sociological considerations. (I hope I
could do something better in the future.) A short description follows:
The aim of this course is to offer a detailed overview of the theory of
complex networks, a relatively new field, the study ofwhich has started
during the last years. Undoubtedly, the interest in complex networks has
followed the growth - mainly during the last decade - of computer networking
on a global scale, as it is manifested by the Internet and the
World-Wide Web (or Web). Furthermore, a large number of other applications
of complex networks has appeared in many fields, as in sociology,
economics, biology, physics etc. Therefore, it is urgently important
for theorists to comprehend the distinctive characteristics of complex
networks through a variety of perspectives, as in structural-static
analysis, in dynamic (time-dependent) behavior and in studies of networked
(non-linear) dynamical systems.
In particular, we are going to cover six areas around complex networks.
First, we are going to study the 'small world' properties, which in a
sense place complex networks somewhere in between regular lattices and
random graphs. Although small world networks have been known to social
scientists since the 1960s, during the last years they have
been found in a growing number of different cases, as in the Web and
networks of scientific collaboration. Moreover, two important
characteristics found in complex networks are that these networks are
scale-free and that various attributes are distributed on these networks
according to non-linear power laws. In this way, studying the graph
structure of the Internet, one is able to discern that these types of
non-linear behavior abound in a broad range, from the Internet
topology to the World-Wide Web and e-mail networks. By understanding the
structure and the dynamics of complex networks, one is able to implement
more efficient methods and algorithms of search on such networks.
Finally, we are interested in analyzing a group of diffusion phenomena
occurring on complex networks, as in epidemics, viruses, spamming etc.;
thus, we intend to study those mechanisms generating heterogeneous
patterns over the network and implying their propagation or effacement or
emergence of diverse equilibrium patterns.
Best,
--Moses A. Boudourides
Associate Professor
Department of Mathematics
University of Patras
265 00 Rio-Patras
Greece
Tel.: +30-2610-996318
Fax: +30-2610-996318, +30-2610-992965
http://www.math.upatras.gr/~mboudour
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