Dynamic Network Analysis of a University Community
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Date: 05-02-2006
Start Time:
1:00pm
End Time: 2:00pm
Speaker: Duncan Watts, Columbia University, Department of Sociology
Location: Uris 333
Abstract
Social networks evolve over time, driven by the shared activities and affiliations of their members, by similarity of individuals’ attributes, and by the closure of network cycles. Theoretical progress in understanding network evolution has, however, been hampered by the historical difficulty of obtaining the appropriate data, especially for large networks. Here I discuss an empirical analysis of a dynamic social network comprising 43,553 students, faculty, and staff at a large university, in which interactions between individuals are inferred from time-stamped e-mail headers recorded over one academic year and are matched with affiliations and attributes. Network evolution is dominated by a combination of effects arising from network topology itself and the organizational structure in which the network is embedded. In the absence of global perturbations, average network properties appear to approach an equilibrium state, whereas individual properties are unstable.
Bio
Duncan Watts is associate professor of sociology at Columbia University, where he directs the Collective Dynamics Group (http://cdg.columbia.edu), and an external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute. His research on social networks and collective dynamics has appeared in a wide range of journals, including Nature, Science, Physical Review Letters, and the American Journal of Sociology. He is also the author of Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (Norton, 2003) and Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks Between Order and Randomness (Princeton University Press, 1999). He holds a B.S. in physics from the University of New South Wales and Ph.D. in theoretical and applied mechanics from Cornell University.