Syllabus Help Center
Please check each week for updates to that week's readings, assignments and materials.
Important: Many of the lectures have embedded in them quizzes pertaining to interactive demos. The in-video quiz may ask you to run a NetLogo model. If your browser is unable to load NetLogo applets, please refer to this page for setup instructions.
For the readings, rather than linking to the publisher's site for articles, I have provided links to Google Scholar queries, where you can find the publisher's versions, but also alternative sources.
Week 1: What are networks and what use is it to study them?
Concepts: nodes, edges, adjacency matrix, node degree, connected components.
| Video | Slides | Extras |
|---|---|---|
| introduction | PPT PDF | NetLogo: visually detecting communities |
| software tools | PPT PDF | |
| network basics | PPT PDF | |
| Gephi demo | download and install Gephi |
Datasets
Recommended reading
- Easley & Kleinberg, Networks, Crowds and Markets, Ch1. Overview.
- Albert-László Barabási, Network Science, Ch 1. Introduction
- Albert-László Barabási, Network Science, Ch 2, sections 2-6,9
Recommended popular science books (optional bedside reading)
- Linked by Albert-László Barabási
- Six Degrees by Duncan Watts.
- other notables: Nexus by Mark Buchanan and Connected by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler.
Assignment 1: will be due at the same time as Assignment 2 to give late starters a chance to catch up
Calculate basic properties of your Facebook social network (or Lada's, your choice), using Gephi.Week 2: Random network models: Erdos-Renyi and Barabasi-Albert
Concepts: connected components, giant component, average shortest path, diameter, breadth-first search, preferential attachment Activities: Create random networks, calculate component distribution, average shortest path, evaluate impact of structure on ability of information to diffuse
Recommended reading
- (for the mathematically minded:) Newman, M. E. J. The Structure and Function of Complex Networks. SIAM Review. 45 (2003): Section IV (Random Graphs) p. 20-24 and Section VII (Models of network growth) p.30-37.
- AL Barabási, R Albert, Emergence of scaling in random networks,Science, 1999.
Assignment 2:
Understand how network structure (generated by different models) affects the diffusion of information and other agents over the network.For those pursuing the optional programming option:
Project for programming option
Programming assignment 1
Week 3: Network centrality
Concepts: betweenness, closeness, eigenvector centrality (+ PageRank), network centralization Activities: calculate and interpret node centrality for real-world networks.
Recommended reading
- A Clauset, CR Shalizi, MEJ Newman, Power-law distributions in empirical data, SIAM review, 2009.
- RS Burt,Structural holes and good ideas,American Journal of Sociology, 2003.
- L Page, S Brin, R Motwani, T Winograd,The PageRank citation ranking: bringing order to the Web, Stanford technical report.
Reading for assignment
- Wayne E. Baker & Robert R. Faulkner, The Social Organization of Conspiracy: Illegal Networks in the Heavy Electrical Equipment Industry, American Sociological Review, 58(6), 1993.
- Sinan Aral and Marshall Van Alstyne,Network Structure and Information Advantage, working paper (full, longer paper published as The Diversity-Bandwidth Trade-Off,American Journal of Sociology, 2011.
Assignment 3: Network Centrality
Optional programming assignment 2
Week 4: Community structure
Concepts: community structure, modularity, overlapping communities Activities: detect and interpret disjoint and overlapping communities in a variety of networks (scientific collaborations, political blogs, cooking ingredients, etc.)
Recommended reading
- MEJ Newman, Modularity and community structure in networks, PNAS 103 (23), p. 8577-8582 (2006).
- Palla et al., 'Uncovering the overlapping community structure of complex networks in nature and society', Nature 435, 814-818 (9 June 2005).
- Santo Fortunato, Community detection in graphs, Physics Reports 486, 75-174 (2010) (a great reference of the developments over the past decade, but not necessarily a quick read).
HW 4
Optional programming assignment 3
Week 5: Small world network models, optimization, strategic network formation and search
Concepts: small worlds, geographic networks, decentralized search Activity: Evaluate whether several real-world networks exhibit small world properties, simulate decentralized search on different topologies, evaluate effect of small-world topology on information diffusion.
Datasets
Recommended reading
- Easley & Kleinberg, Networks, Crowds and Markets, Ch20. The Small-World Phenomenon.
- Watts & Strogatz, Collective Dynamics of Small World Networks, Nature 393, 440-442 (4 June 1998).
- Travers & Milgram, An Experimental Study of the Small World Problem,Sociometry, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Dec., 1969).
Additional reading mentioned in the lectures
- Kilworth & Bernard, The Reveral Small-World Experiment, Social Networks, 1 (1978/79) 159-192.
- Kilworth, McCarthy, Bernard & House. (2006). The Accuracy of Small World Chains in Social Networks. Social Networks 28(1): 85-96.
- Dodds, Muhammad, and Watts, An Experimental Study of Search in Global Social Networks", Science, 301, 827-829 (2003).
- D. J. Watts, P. S. Dodds, and M. E. J. Newman. Identity and Search in Social Networks, Science, 296, 1302-1305 (2002).
- Jon Kleinberg, The Small-World Phenomenon, An Algorithmic Perspective.
- J. Kleinberg. Small-World Phenomena and the Dynamics of Information. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) 14, 2001.
- Mathias & Gopal, Small worlds: How and why, PRE 2001.
- Gastner & Newman,The spatial structure of networks, Michael T. Gastner and M. E. J. Newman, Eur. Phys. J. B 49, 247–252 (2006).
Reading for assignment
Liben-Nowell et al. Geographic Routing in Social Networks, PNAS 102(33):11623-11628, 2005.HW 5 small worlds
.The only remaining programming assignment is the peer-graded project.
Week 6: Contagion, opinion formation, coordination and cooperation
Concepts: simple contagion, threshold models, opinion formation Activity: Evaluate via simulation the impact of network structure on the above processes
Datasets
Homework 6
Recommended reading
- Easley & Kleinberg, Networks, Crowds and Markets, Ch19.Cascading Behavior in Networks
- Damon Centola and Michael Macy, Complex Contagions and the Weakness of Long Ties, American Journal of Sociology, 113(3), 2007.
- David Lazer and Allan Friedman, The Network Structure of Exploration and Exploitation, Administrative Science Quarterly, 52(4), p. 667-694, 2007.
- Michael Kearns, Siddarth Suri,Nick Montfort, An Experimental Study of the Coloring Problem on Human Subject Networks, Science 313, 824 (2006).
Week 7: Cool and unusual applications of SNA
Homework 7
Recommended reading
Economic development- C. A. Hidalgo, B. Klinger, A.-L. Barabási, and R. Hausmann. The Product Space Conditions the Development of Nations, Science 27 July 2007: 317 (5837), 482-487.
- C.A. Hidalgo and R. Hausmann,The building block of economic complexity, PNAS, 106(26), 2009.
- YY Ahn, SE Ahnert, JP Bagrow, AL Barabási,Flavor network and the principles of food pairing,Nature Scientific Reports, 2011.
- CY Teng, YR Lin, LA Adamic, Recipe recommendation using ingredient networks, Web Science 2012.
- Goh et al. The human disease network,PNAS 104(21), 2007.
- AL Barabási, N Gulbahce, J Loscalzo,Network medicine: a network-based approach to human disease Nature Reviews Genetics, 2011.
- D Lusseau, The emergent properties of a dolphin social network, Proc. Roy. Soc. B, 2003.
Week 8: SNA and social media + leftover topic of network resilience
Since we are having interviews with researchers working @ Google Plus, LinkedIn and Facebook throughout the course, the last week will be devoted to the leftover topic of resilience.
| Video | Slides | Extras |
|---|---|---|
| 8A: network resilience | PDF, PPT | Guess: network resilience |
| 8B: resilience and assortativity | NetLogo: assortativity and resilience | |
| 8C: resilience and the US power grid | ||
| 8D: concluding remarks |
Recommended reading
- R Albert, H Jeong, AL Barabási,Error and attack tolerance of complex networks,Nature, 2000.
- R.Kinney, P Crucitti, R Albert, V Latora,Modeling cascading failures in the North American power grid, EPJB 2005.
- Damon Centola,,'The spread of behavior in an online social network experiment', Science, 2010.
- Sinan Aral and Dylan Walker,Creating social contagion through viral product design: A randomized trial of peer influence in networks",Management Science, 2011.
- Bakshy, Rosenn, Marlow, and Adamic,The role of social networks in information diffusion,Proc. WWW, 2012
Week 9: Final
The final will be available Monday Dec. 1st and due Sunday Dec. 7th. It will be timed (2 hours), you will have only one attempt. You will not have to run any simulations or use any software.Last Modified Mon 6 Oct 2014 8:16 PM CEST