MACSI wins prize in Best Paper awards at European Conference on Complex System
A paper written by MACSI researchers Sergey Melnik, Adam Hackett, and James Gleeson (in collaboration with Mason Porter of Oxford and Peter Mucha of the University of North Carolina) has been recognised in the Best Papers awards at the European Conference on Complex Systems (www.eccs2010.eu). This conference, which was held in Lisbon in September, is the largest European conference on complexity and complex systems. Held annually since 2004, ECCS attracts more than 300 scientific contributions to 6 parallel sessions.
The paper by Melniket al. was awarded joint second prize, which includes a cash prize sponsored by Springer (see www.eccs2010.eu/bestpaperawards for details). The focus of the paper is on the effectiveness of idealized mathematical approximations in describing the action of dynamical processes operating on complex networks – think, for example, of the spread of rumours over the Facebook social network, or the spread of computer viruses over the Internet network.
Melnik and his co-authors show that many idealized models (that are known to have analytical solutions) work surprisingly well on certain real-world networks such as Facebook, despite the fact that these networks do not satisfy the mathematical assumptions underlying the analytical results. They identify basic structural properties of the networks which can be used to predict whether the idealized theories will give accurate results when compared, for example, with numerical simulations of the processes on the network in question.
The title of the paper ("The unreasonable effectiveness of tree-based theory for bond percolation on networks with clustering") is a tribute to the famous article by Eugene Wigner on the surprising effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences. A preprint version is available on the ArXiv server atarXiv.org/pdf/1001.1439v1.pdf. The work of the UL researchers is funded by Science Foundation Ireland through a PI award and the MACSI Mathematics Initiative award (www.macsi.ul.ie).
