Citizendia

Network science is a new and emerging scientific discipline that examines the interconnections among diverse physical, informational, biological, cognitive, and social networks. This field of science seeks to discover common principles, algorithms and tools that govern network behavior. The National Research Council defines Network Science as "the organized knowledge of networks based on their study using the scientific method. "

Several U. S. governmental agencies such as the Department of Defense and the National Science foundation have recently begun to fund research in this field. The U. S. Military Academy has been teaching the subject matter to cadets and has formed a Network Science Center to facilitate education and research within the Army. The Army is also in the process of establishing a research center for Network Science at Aberdeen Proving Grounds. In addition, several universities are conducting active research in military aspects of network science, such as Carnegie Mellon University, Northeastern University, and the University of Pennsylvania, while others, such as Harvard, Columbia, University of California, Irvine, University of Toronto and many others in the social sciences, for example, have older research programs in this area. In 1977, INSNA, the International Network for Social Network Analysis, was founded by Barry Wellman, the same year as the startup of the EIES (an Internet forerunner: Electronic Information Exchange System) computer conference organized by Linton C. The International Network for Social Network Analysis is the professional association of Social network analysis. Barry Wellman, FRSC (born 1942 directs NetLab as the SD Clark Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. New Jersey Institute of Technology is a public research University in Newark, New Jersey. Freeman and Douglas R. White that brought together network scientists from diverse fields[1]. Douglas R White ( 1942) is an American complexity researcher, social anthropologist, sociologist, and Social network researcher The Social Networks journal was started by Freeman in 1978.

Sub disciplines of network science include dynamic network analysis, social network analysis, the study of complex networks, network optimization, network biology, and graph theory. Dynamic network analysis (DNA is an emergent scientific field that brings together traditional Social network analysis (SNA Link analysis (LA and Multi-agent A social network is a Social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency such as In the context of Network theory, a complex network is a network ( graph) with non-trivial Topological features&mdashfeatures that do not In Mathematics and Computer science, graph theory is the study of graphs: mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects

In September 2006, scientists from several universities initiated the International Council On Network Science (ICONS). This society aims to promote and facilitate the study and education of network science.

Background and history

The study of networks has emerged in diverse disciplines as a means of analyzing complex relational data. The earliest known paper in this field is the famous Seven Bridges of Königsberg written by Leonhard Euler in 1736. The Seven Bridges of Königsberg is a famous historical problem in mathematics Euler's mathematical description of vertices and edges was the foundation of Graph Theory, a branch of mathematics that studies the properties of pairwise relations in a network structure. In Mathematics and Computer science, graph theory is the study of graphs: mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects The field of Graph Theory continued to develop and found applications in chemistry (Sylvester, 1878). In Mathematics and Computer science, graph theory is the study of graphs: mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects

In the 1930's Jacob Moreno, a psychologist in the Gestalt tradition, arrived in the United States. Dr Jacob Levy Moreno (born Bucharest, Romania, May 18 1889; died New York, USA, May 14 He developed the sociogram and presented it to the public in April 1933 at a convention of medical scholars. Moreno claimed that "before the advent of sociometry no one knew what the interpersonal structure of a group 'precisely' looked like (Moreno, 1953). The sociogram was a representation of the social structure of a group of elementary school students. The boys were friends of boys and the girls were friends of girls with the exception of one boy who said he like a single girl. The feeling was not reciprocated. This network representation of social structure was found so intriguing that it was printed in the The New York Times (April 3, 1933, page 17). The sociogram has found many applications and has grown into the field of social network analysis. A social network is a Social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency such as

Probabilistic theory in Network Science developed as an off-shoot of Graph Theory with Paul Erdős and Alfréd Rényi's eight famous papers on random graphs. In Mathematics and Computer science, graph theory is the study of graphs: mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects Paul Erdős ( Hungarian: Erdős Pál, in English occasionally Paul Erdos or Paul Erdös, March 26, 1913 &ndash Alfréd Rényi (20 March 1921 &ndash 1 February 1970 was a Hungarian Mathematician who made contributions in Combinatorics and Graph theory For social networks the exponential random graph model or p* graph is a notational framework used to represent the probability space of a tie occurring in a social network. A social network is a Social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency such as A social network is a Social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency such as An alternate approach to network probability structures is the Network Probability Matrix, which models the probability of edges occurring in a network, based on the historic presence or absence of the edge in a sample of networks. The Network Probability Matrix describes the probability structure of a network based on the historical precence or absence of edges in a network

The U. S. military became interested in Network-centric warfare as an operational concept based on network science in 1996. Network-centric warfare (NCW, now commonly called network-centric operations (NCO, is a new Military doctrine or theory of war pioneered by the United States Subsequently, the U. S. Department of Defense has funded numerous research projects in the area of Network Science.

In the 1998, David Krackhardt and Kathleen Carley introduced the idea of a meta-network with the PCANS Model. Kathleen M Carley is an American social scientist specializing in Dynamic network analysis. They suggest that "all organizations are structured along these three domains, Individuals, Tasks, and Resources. Their paper introduced the concept that networks occur across multiple domains and that they are interrelated. This field has grown into another sub-discipline of network science called Dynamic Network Analysis. Dynamic network analysis (DNA is an emergent scientific field that brings together traditional Social network analysis (SNA Link analysis (LA and Multi-agent

More recently other network science efforts have focussed on mathematically describing different network topologies. Duncan Watts reconciled empirical data on networks with mathematical representation, describing the small-world network. In Mathematics and Physics, a small-world network is a type of mathematical graph in which most nodes are not neighbors of one another but most nodes can Albert-László Barabási and Reka Albert developed the scale-free network which is a topology that contains hub vertices with many connections, while most vertices have relatively few connections. Albert-László Barabási (born March 30 1967 is a Romanian born Hungarian scientist A scale-free network is a network whose Degree distribution follows a Power law, at least asymptotically

Today, network science is an exciting and growing field. Scientists from many diverse fields are working together. Network science holds the promise of increasing collaboration across disciplines, by sharing data, algorithms, and software tools.

Further reading

References

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