50 Years of the Great Journal Networks and a Video

 In 2021, we are marking the 50th anniversary of the great journal - Networks, which is truly a landmark anniversary! In order to celebrate this anniversary appropriately, the Co-Editors Bruce Golden and Doug Shier took the great initiative of editing a special issue of the journal, in Parts 1 and 2.

I am thrilled and absolutely delighted that Part 1 has now been published and is the first issue of the January 2021 volume.  In it, I am greatly honored to have my paper, which was written following an invitation from the Co-Editors that I could not refuse.

My paper, "Networks in economics and finance in Networks and beyond: A half century retrospective," traces and synthesizes the significant contributions to this area in papers published in this journal and in other journals and books. Yes, I pored through all the papers in the journal since its inception and to emphasize the "beyond" part - I went as far back as 1758! It was also important to incorporate relevant more recent contributions from the Network Science community.

A preprint of my paper can be downloaded here. 

Also, the Co-Editors organizes a special session at the recent INFORMS Annual Meeting this year, which was virtual because of the pandemic and several of the contributors to the special volume spoke.

Below is a photo of us!

The slide deck of my INFORMS presentation can be downloaded here.

The video of my presentation can be viewed here.

Congratulations to Networks on its 50th Anniversary and thanks to all the Editors over the years and to the authors as well as to the reviewers of many articles! Wishing the journal and researchers on networks many more successful years and research discoveries!

Once Part 2 of the special issue of Networks dedicated to the 50th Anniversary is posted online by the publisher Wiley, I will be providing a link to it on this blogpost.

Financial and Economic Networks, Executive Education at Harvard University and the World Bank, Science Magazine, and a Fulbright in Italy

Some of you may have seen Science magazine's special issue on Complex Systems and Networks, which was published on July 24, 2009. Coincidentally, that was the same day that I was teaching a course on Portfolio Optimization at Harvard University in its Executive Education AMDP program at the Graduate School of Design. In constructing the material for this course I assembled volumes of relevant literature and also made use of the following books that I had co-authored: Financial Networks: Statics and Dynamics and Fragile Networks: Identifying Vulnerabilities and Synergies in an Uncertain World, and the book, Innovations in Financial and Economic Networks, that I had edited. Information on these books, as well as on my Network Economics book can be found here.

In the special issue of Science there is also an article on Economic Networks, in which the authors argue the importance of this theme. However, the special issue has no contributions from the operations research and management science communities who have been principal contributors to the networks literature for over 50 years! Interestingly, last year I was invited by Professor Michael Trick of Carnegie Mellon University to comment on an article published in Operations Research by Professor David Alderson of the Naval Postgraduate School and did so. The article argued for closer collaborations across disciplines in the area of network science. The link to the article along with the commentaries can be found here. Professor Alderson was one of the invited speakers in the Dynamic Networks workshop that I organized with Professor David Parkes of Harvard, under the auspices of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study programs. This workshop brought together physicists, computer scientists, economists, operations researchers, and applied mathematicians to discuss frontier topics in dynamic networks. Last year, I had the distinct honor of being a Fulbright Senior Specialist at the University of Catania in Italy and with Professor Patrizia Daniele organized a Workshop on Complex Networks.

Towards the goal of further disseminating state-of-the-art research on networks in economics and finance I am sharing with you my lectures on Portfolio Optimization and on Network Economics, given, respectively, at Harvard University and at the World Bank.

Given how many important problems there are in the world to solve it makes no sense to be reinventing the wheel. Disciplines need to give credit where credit is due and to work together. Both my Portfolio Optimization course and Network Economics course lectures highlight the richness and depth of network analysis and what it can bring to the formulation, analysis, and solution of critical problems that we are facing today.