[Sci-all-l] Asprey lectures

[Benjamin Lotto]

Dear All,

I would like to encourage all of you to come to Jon Kleinberg's first  
lecture, "Modeling the Web, Mining my E-mail, and Other Perspectives  
on the Information Revolution," on Wednesday evening at 8pm in Rocky  
300. Try to bring a non-major friend or two, noting especially the  
last sentence of the following abstract:

>  The rise of large-scale information networks such as the World  
> Wide Web
> has been a profound and transformative development, and the terrain
> surrounding these systems is at once social, political, technological,
> and mathematical.  Some of the basic techniques for managing  
> information
> at this scale, as well as some of our working metaphors for  
> interacting
> with this information, have their roots in fundamental mathematical
> models, and we survey several that have played crucial roles over the
> past decade. These include the use of network analysis in the current
> generation of Web search engines; the modeling of temporal  
> phenomena in
> tracking news, discussion, commentary, and blogging over time; and the
> role of human social networks in the foundations of current on-line  
> media.
> The lecture will be self-contained, and in particular will assume
> no prior background in any of these topics.

Professor Kleinberg is also giving a second lecture, "Search Problems  
and Complex Networks," on Thursday afternoon at 4:30pm in Rocky 300.  
It is a version of the Nevanlinna Prize lecture he gave at the  
International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid in August.  Here's  
the abstract:

> The study of complex networks has emerged over the past several  
> years as
> a theme spanning many disciplines, ranging from mathematics and  
> computer
> science to the social and biological sciences.  A significant  
> amount of
> recent work in this area has focused on the development of  
> probabilistic
> and algorithmic models that capture some of the qualitative properties
> observed in large-scale network data; such models have the  
> potential to
> help us reason, at a general level, about the ways in which real-world
> networks are organized.
>
> We discuss one particular line of network research, concerned with
> small-world phenomena and decentralized search algorithms, that
> illustrates this style of analysis.  We begin by describing a well- 
> known
> experiment that provided the first empirical basis for the ``six  
> degrees
> of separation'' phenomenon in social networks; we then discuss some
> probabilistic network models motivated by this work, illustrating how
> these models lead to novel algorithmic and combinatorial questions,  
> and
> how they are supported by recent empirical studies of large social
> networks.

I hope to see you there on Wednesday night and Thursday afternoon!

Thanks,
-Ben Lotto

--
Benjamin Lotto
Chair, Department of Mathematics & College Marshal
Box 349 / Vassar College / Poughkeepsie, NY 12604
ph: 845-437-7180, fax: 845-437-7544
email: lotto [at] vassar [dot] edu
office hours (F06): M 3-4:30, T 10-11:30