Title: CS 6/75995 Complex Networks

 

Spring 2009

Department of Computer Science

Kent State University

 



Introduction:


Various large scaled networked systems such as peer-to-peer networks, social networks, crowd sourcing systems (wikipedia for example), networked games have quite conspicuously emerged among the most innovation rich areas in computer networking. These systems now represent the most significant development in computing since the web.  Large scale networked systems are now being modeled, formalized, and even engineered based on distributed hashing, self-organization, complex networking, and graph theories. It has also become a breeding ground of technical innovations. Researchers are delving into new territories of overlay network design, replication and caching, publish/subscribe routing, distributed multicast, range query, etc. This course will introduce and discuss some of the now famous seminal experiments in the area such as Six Degrees of Seperation or Erdo’s Numbers. While discussing such brain stimulating observations made by scientists it will also teach analytical methods for understanding complex network systems.


 

Who Should Attend: This is a graduate/doctoral level course. If you are interested in conducting research in large scale networked/web-based systems, network design, strategic computing, cyber security, web-based game design, search, data mining, social network engineering, this course should make you up-to-date and conversant with the latest analytical tools being used by researchers. Accelerated undergraduates planning to pursue a joint graduate degree may also take this course with special permission.

 


Introductory Reading:  To get a feel about the topics: A.-L. Barabási, Scale-Free Networks,Scientific American 288, 50-59 (2003).


Topics:
This new course- will try introduce the topic based on formal foundation:



Intended Students: Doctoral and MS students. If you are an advanced Undergraduate and interested to pursue graduate studies see me for special permission. The course will be research intensive. Will require you to study advanced technical papers and produce a creative project/paper.




Text: class notes. For each topic we will also read some research papers after the lectures.


Grading:

Type

Frequency

Weight

Assignments

3

20%

Critical Review/ Presentation

1-2

20%

Creative Project/ Survey

1

20%

Midterm Exam

1

20%

Final Exam

1

20%

 


Links:

1. World of Warcraft.
2. Barabasi Lab.
3. Milgram's Six Degrees of Separation