The Core

I signee up as well.  The course looks *very* interesting...

ergo, same. I'd taken up an open uni mats course 10 years ago and "got" the matrix stuff only just, I was too busy doing web stuff and scraping past with pass marks. I'd need to go back to the books to truly understand/use it.

BTW, ergophobe, I dont think be posted in 'water cooler' - this is totally marketing related(?)

 

Probably, I spent half an hour looking at it today. The syllabus is at the foot of this post.

The first batch of work is just covering the basic terminology used. The main focus of the course will be social networks but with a hint of other networks like international trade. There's optional programming tasks if you have a programming background.

It looks like Gephi will be the tool of choice for the course. https://gephi.org/

Week 1: What are networks and what use is it to study them?

Concepts: nodes, edges, adjacency matrix, one and two-mode networks, node degree

Recommended reading

    Easley & Kleinberg, Networks, Crowds and Markets, Ch1. Overview.
    Albert-László Barabási, Network Science, Ch 1. Introduction
    Albert-László Barabási, Network Science, Ch 2, sections 2-6,9

Recommended popular science books (optional bedside reading)

    Linked by Albert-László Barabási
    Six Degrees by Duncan Watts.
    other notables: Nexus by Mark Buchanan and Connected by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler.

Assignment 1: available Monday 9/24, due Friday 10/5
Calculate basic properties of your Facebook social network (or Lada's, your choice), using Gephi. Optional: If you are so inclined, you can perform the analysis in R + igraph (starter script) or Python + NetworkX (starter script) instead of or in addition to Gephi in order to answer the same questions. The assignment is not due until the following Friday to allow folks joining the course late to catch up and for the teaching staff to iron out any software kinks. However, beware that assignment 2 is due the following Tuesday 10/9, so get this one in before the deadline, is our advice.
Week 2: Random network models: Erdos-Renyi and Barabasi-Albert

Concepts: connected components, giant component, average shortest path, diameter, breadth-first search, preferential attachment Activities: Create random networks, calculate component distribution, average shortest path, evaluate impact of structure on ability of information to diffuse
Recommended reading

    AL Barabási, R Albert, Emergence of scaling in random networks,Science, 1999.

Week 3: Network centrality

Concepts: betweenness, closeness, eigenvector centrality (+ PageRank), network centralization Activities: calculate and interpret node centrality for real-world networks (your Facebook graph, the Enron corporate email network, Twitter networks, etc.)
Recommended reading

    A Clauset, CR Shalizi, MEJ Newman, Power-law distributions in empirical data, SIAM review, 2009.
    RS Burt,Structural holes and good ideas,American Journal of Sociology, 2003.
    L Page, S Brin, R Motwani, T Winograd,The PageRank citation ranking: bringing order to the Web, Stanford technical report.

Reading for assignment

    Wayne E. Baker & Robert R. Faulkner, The Social Organization of Conspiracy: Illegal Networks in the Heavy Electrical Equipment Industry, American Sociological Review, 58(6), 1993.
    Sinan Aral and Marshall Van Alstyne,Network Structure and Information Advantage, working paper (full, longer paper published as The Diversity-Bandwidth Trade-Off,American Journal of Sociology, 2011.

Week 4: Community structure

Concepts: clustering, community structure, modularity, overlapping communities Activities: detect and interpret disjoint and overlapping communities in a variety of networks (scientific collaborations, political blogs, cooking ingredients, etc.)
Recommended reading

    Easley & Kleinberg, Networks, Crowds and Markets, Ch5. Positive and Negative Relationships.

Week 5: Small world network models, optimization, strategic network formation and search

Concepts: small worlds, geographic networks, decentralized search Activity: Evaluate whether several real-world networks exhibit small world properties, simulate decentralized search on different topologies, evaluate effect of small-world topology on information diffusion.
Recommended reading

    Easley & Kleinberg, Networks, Crowds and Markets, Ch20. The Small-World Phenomenon.

Week 6: Contagion, opinion formation, coordination and cooperation

Concepts: simple contagion, threshold models, opinion formation Activity: Evaluate via simulation the impact of network structure on the above processes
Recommended reading

    Damon Centola,,'The spread of behavior in an online social network experiment', Science, 2010.
    Sinan Aral and Dylan Walker,Creating social contagion through viral product design: A randomized trial of peer influence in networks",Management Science, 2011.
    Bakshy, Rosenn, Marlow, and Adamic,The role of social networks in information diffusion,Proc. WWW, 2012

Week 7: Cool and unusual applications of SNA
Recommended reading
Economic development

    C. A. Hidalgo, B. Klinger, A.-L. Barabási, and R. Hausmann. The Product Space Conditions the Development of Nations, Science 27 July 2007: 317 (5837), 482-487.
    C.A. Hidalgo and R. Hausmann,The building block of economic complexity, PNAS, 106(26), 2009.

Recipes and ingredient networks

    YY Ahn, SE Ahnert, JP Bagrow, AL Barabási,Flavor network and the principles of food pairing,Nature Scientific Reports, 2011.
    CY Teng, YR Lin, LA Adamic, Recipe recommendation using ingredient networks, Web Science 2012.

Human disease network

    Goh et al. The human disease network,PNAS 104(21), 2007.
    AL Barabási, N Gulbahce, J Loscalzo,Network medicine: a network-based approach to human disease Nature Reviews Genetics, 2011.

Animal networks

    D Lusseau, The emergent properties of a dolphin social network, Proc. Roy. Soc. B, 2003.

Week 8: SNA and social media

Concepts: how services such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, CouchSurfing, etc. are using SNA to understand their users and improve their functionality Activity: read recent research by and based on these services and learn how SNA concepts were applied
Recommended reading

    Damon Centola,,'The spread of behavior in an online social network experiment', Science, 2010.
    Sinan Aral and Dylan Walker,Creating social contagion through viral product design: A randomized trial of peer influence in networks",Management Science, 2011.
    Bakshy, Rosenn, Marlow, and Adamic,The role of social networks in information diffusion,Proc. WWW, 2012

I signed up, got the email but when I clicked through the  promised vids didn;t seem to be there. Will try again at the weekend when I get some spare time... hopefully its going to be interesting enough to make me stick with it!

>in english

i think the course covers a lot of the terminology at the start so it isn't all that bad.

the Bacon number thing that Google has been playing with is an example of a small-world network.  I was thinking that any new bacon-type answers are just going to be queries that match one of any/many small worlds.