Network Science, the new ABCs of Life

Science progresses by observing a pattern in daily life and a constructing a theory about it, which then explains a much wider range of similar events.

Similar search for patterns in mundane events is now focusing its attention on patterns of human behavior.

“As our actions garnered by rules and mechanism that in their simplicity match the predictive pattern of Newton’s law of gravitation….might we go so far as the predictive human behavior.”asks Albert-Lasio Barabazi in his new book bursts,The hidden patterns behind everything we do, From your email to bloody crusades.

He and his co-workers recently studied the pattern of email and found that the human pattern of mailing activity is intense activity for shorter periods, followed by long periods and often days of no email. This matches with paper mail correspondence of albert einstien in the 1905-1910 period.

A big area of research currently attempts to understand how another common pattern in every day life, social networks, among human beings operate.An example of one such [pattern is citation networks.These occur when the author of a scientific paper cites other scientific paper.

One such pattern already noticed is the ” citation cortel” that has been established in order to make the difference between the quality of the scientists ,measured by number of cites higher.Network analysis is also revealing groups of editors and journals working together for mutual benefit by using inter journal sites to increase impact factors for their journals.

A wide varierty of Networks are being currently researched – financial networks to detect insider trading,terrorist networks to detect their emergence being two examples.

Deep study of networks is already yielding techniques to elevate the field to almost the same level as that of physics and chemestry with a similar set of abstract concepts.”size” of a network is now defined as the sum total of the links between the actors(nodes) in the network.”{Density” is the ratio of number of Links (“{called edge”) between the actors(called “nodes”) in the network divided by the number of all possible links. The “degree ” of an actor is the number of links (“edges”) connecting to it.The node centrality measures tells you the important role of each node in the network.

The success of artists can be traced to their position in network.For example researchers at the Network sciences Institute , Northeastern university boston exhibited history of half a million artists, mapping out the co-exhibition network that captures the movement of art between indications centrality within this network captured institution prestige. They concluded that ” Early access s to prestigious central institutions offers life long access to high prestige venues and reduced dropout rate.

Example of Universities and government setting up ” network science centers” throughout the world. Yale Institute of network science .It studies word of mouth networks to see how buzz happen.

Havard -> Networked medicines to in biology and disease research the role ,identification and behavior in biology.In India ISER and IIT indore are taking up this reaserch.