Earlier this month, the Obama administration announced its plan to put $100 million toward building a network map of the human brain. World leading network scientist and Northeastern Distinguished Professor Albert-László Barabási is excited about the new project, but says the so-called “connectome” of neural interactions in the brain is but one network of many ...
Last night I finally got a chance to finish reading all of the stories in the 14th issue of NUScience, which hit the shelves a few weeks ago. The magazine is Northeastern’s first and only science magazine, and, as far as I know a pretty unique undertaking in the undergraduate world. They’ve been around since ...
The other day I starred the following headline in my RSS feed: “Any Two Pages on the Web Are Connected By 19 Clicks or Less.” I didn’t read it immediately because it sounded like vaguely familiar old news that I could probably return to later. But this morning in our office’s daily editorial meeting, I ...
If you’ve driven on the highway, you’ve seen it: The traffic jam appears out of nowhere and disappears just as mysteriously. We blame the cars around us for their poor driving skills, and slam on our own breaks. During an AAAS annual meeting session hosted by Northeastern professor Albert-László Barabási, Northwestern professor Dirk Helbing showed ...
I’ve written quite a bit about Network Science both here and for the News@Northeastern. And since learning the term less than a year ago, I’ve come to believe that it will be critical in the way we approach many scientific questions going forward. Nonetheless, it remains a somewhat elusive subject. Most people (including myself) initially ...
I’ve been on a space kick lately, ever since I got a telescope for my birthday and looked up close at the moon for the first time in my life. So the image on the left calls to my mind nebulae and distant galaxies…a sort of map of the universe, that infinitely large entity. But ...
I just met one of the coolest people at Northeastern. His name is Mauro Martino and he’s the man behind most of the data visualization coming out of the university’s various network science labs. After spending a couple years at the MIT media lab, he joined Albert-László Barabási’s Center for Complex Network Research and David ...
I’m about halfway through physics professor Albert-Laszlo Barabasi’s book, Bursts. I’ll be writing about “bursty behavior” for the news at northeastern soon, but for today’s blog purposes suffice to say that humans behave in a “bursty” pattern instead of uniformly across time. For example, you probably don’t write an email once every twenty minutes all ...
Albert-László Barabasi is a world leader in the emerging field of network science. In his research, Barabasi seeks to understand the properties of various types of systems, be they biological, information-based, technological or even social. “There are some common organizing principles that describe these different types of networks, he says. “In many ways these networks ...