Comp. Analysis of Social Networks May 1, 2005

National Academy of Sciences Annual Meeting
Public Symposium on Frontiers of Science: Computational Analysis of Social Networks

The computational analysis of social networks has recently become a hot topic at the interface of computer science, the social sciences, and statistical physics. This is in large part due to the explosive growth of both the Web and the Internet. The link structure on the Web allows us to examine the relationships among interests, topics, and people. Do we have six-degrees of separation? What do "web-communities" look like? We can see the extent to which simple mathematical models capture its high-level properties. In addition, the rise of e-commerce has also spurred exciting work in economics/game-theory in a graph or network setting. If we view entities as nodes in a network, with links representing opportunities for trade, then how do issues of connectivity and "who is able to trade with whom" affect prices and equilibria? Approaches used by researchers in this area represent an appealing mixture of computational, mathematical, and social-science methods.

http://www4.nationalacademies.org/nas/nashome.nsf/urllinks/NAS-6AZV3H?OpenDocument