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 ...
Here are two things that shouldn’t surprise you: Our past experiences determine our future behaviors and our social interactions are constantly changing. When it comes to humans operating in the world, these are just facts and we don’t think about them that much. But they are deeply connected to the way information spreads. Right now ...
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 ...
Debate season is an exciting time for professor David Lazer’s lab, and I’m delighted to be able to bring you more analysis from their team. This time, research assistant professor Yu-Ru Lin explains what their Twitter-meter had to say about Tuesday night’s presidential debate. Together with Drew Margolin, Lin led a team from the Lazer ...
Since you’re reading this blog, you’ve probably heard of network science and big data by now. It’s the field of research in which scientists leverage the amazing amounts of data we have these days to understand the world’s myriad networks, be they social, genetic or even transportation-based (ie., the network of airline flights across the ...
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 ...
A couple weeks ago I attended the pharmaceutical sciences research expo, where, as you might imagine, a bunch of pharmaceutical scientists got together to present their current work. Among a slew of other cool things I learned, I discovered that we have something called the Center for Translational Neuro-Imaging on campus. If you want to ...
Here’s another Twitter-analysis post for all you network science junkies out there. And although I’m a bit late to the table (New Scientist reported on this a week ago) I couldn’t resist. Bruno Gonçalves, a postdoc in Alessandro Vespignani‘s research group here at Northeastern, and three colleagues at Indiana University expanded their research on partisan ...
Here’s a cool new FB app from computer sciences professor, Alan Mislove. It’s called Friendlist Manager and it makes using lists on the social-network (a.k.a. time sink) a whole lot easier (as if you needed anything on FB to be easier, since you don’t already spend enough time there). Mislove uses network information to build ...
The library has an awesome new exhibit up called “Places & Spaces: Mapping Science.” They’ve got dozens of maps describing a variety of scientific concepts and trends, like one spider web of connections between scientific disciplines and a crazy topographical visualization of patent patterns across the globe. This is a particularly interesting concept to me ...