- Time & Location
- Tuesday 9:30am-12pm, Informatics West 107
First meeting: Tuesday, Jan. 14th 2014
- Instructor
- Yong-Yeol Ahn (YY)
yyahn@indiana.edu
Office: Informatics East Room 316
Phone: (812) 856 2920
Office hours: TBD
(You can always email me or use MeetMe)
- Prerequisites
- The course will requires working knowledge of probability, algorithms, linear algebra, and programming.
Description
Networks provide a unifying framework to study many complex systems, such as living cells, brains, society, etc. This course focuses on the fundamentals and key applications of network science, addressing the following questions: why do networks matter? what are the fundamental frameworks and theories to understand the structure and dynamics of networks? how has network framework been applied to other fields? What are the frontiers of the research?
Objectives
By the end of the course, you will be able to
- understand when, how, and why networks matter;
- perform network analysis on your networks to gain insights into the system;
- carry out a small research project involving network analysis.
Key ideas and concepts
- Random graphs
- Small world networks
- Scale-free networks
- Random walks
- Clustering and communities
- Robustness
- Social networks
- Web and information networks
- Network epidemiology
- Information spreading
- Biological networks
Final assessment
Final assessment will be based on your class project. In the project you will carry out a small network science project in which you will apply methods and knowledge from the class.
Class policies
- All announcements will be sent via the course mailing list. You are responsible for reading each announcement.
- You should read all the assigned readings prior to the class.
- You have the responsibility of backing up all their data and code. Today is International
Backup Awareness Day! Use a backup drive, dropbox, or whatever service you
find it useful. If you are comfortable with commandlines, I highly
recommend using a version
control system, especially with hosting services such as github (IU provides a firewalled github), bitbucket, etc.
- Please contact the instructor if you have a disability that require some arrangements so that appropriate arrangements can be made.
Academic integrity
The principles of academic honesty and ethics will be enforced. Any
cases of academic misconduct (cheating, fabrication, plagiarism, etc)
will be thoroughly investigated and immediately reported to the School
and the Dean of Students.
You should actively discuss with others, but you should write your own
report. Credit all the sources (discussion with other students, used
softwares, etc).
Grading policy
- Attendance & Class participation 20%
- Project: 50%
- Assignments: 30%
- 10% penalty until one week after deadline; 30% penalty after one week.
Papers from previous offerings
- L. Weng, F. Menczer, Y.-Y. Ahn, Virality Prediction and Community Structure in Social Networks, Sci. Rep. 3, 2522 (2013).
- L. Weng, F. Menczer, Y.-Y. Ahn, Predicting Successful Memes using Network and Community Structure, ICWSM'14
- A. Seal, Y.-Y. Ahn, D.J. Wild, Drug Target Prediction Based on Random Walks on Heterogeneous Networks, submitted.
Deliverables
The deliverables are
Project proposal
A two to four page document that contains
- Project title
- Team members
- Abstract
- Related work
- Your approach and plan
Proposal presentation
We will follow the
Ignite format. You should have
20 slides and each slide will auto-advance every
15 seconds. Submit the slides the day before the class. It should address
- Motivation (why is it interesting? why do you care?)
- Relevant existing work (what have been done by others?)
- Potential contribution (why and how does your project differ from other work?)
- Your approach and plan (how will you do it?)
- Preliminary results (if any)
Progress reports
The progress report will be a draft of the final paper. I can always discuss about the project with you independent of the progress report. Include all the elements listed in the final paper section below.
Final paper
6-10 pages, single space, two column. You can use a generic CS conference format or other reasonable journal/conference formats.
- Title
- Abstract
- Introduction: why should we care?
- Related work: What others have done?
- Data and Methods: How is it done?
- Results: What have you found?
- Discussion: What are the limitations? What are the outstanding questions? etc.
Final presentation
Each team will have 15 minutes presentation + 5 minutes Q & A. Include the elements outlined for the paper.
Books
Links
Softwares, libraries, and data
Softwares and libraries
Data
Other courses