The Fragile Networks Tutorial at NIH

Today, Dr. Patrick Qiang and I gave our tutorial on Fragile Networks: Identifying Vulnerabilities and Synergies in an Uncertain World, which is also the title of our book published by John Wiley & Sons. The tutorial took place at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which has a lovely campus in Bethesda, Maryland. The trees are blooming here and the tutorial was one of four delivered today. These tutorials precede the 2010 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral Modeling & Prediction (SBP2010), which begins tomorrow and at which about 500 delegates are expected. You may find our tutorial, which consisted of three distinct modules here.

Dr. Qiang and I had a wonderful time at our tutorial and the audience consisted of academics, consultants, and government employees, as well as researchers, and represented disciplines from computer science and applied mathematics to computational economics, medicine, and physics. The questions were great and the conversations truly stimulating. We met some marvelous people and saw some old friends. I am enjoying the collegial atmosphere and discussions tremendously. After our tutorial we had a wonderful dinner with a brilliant researcher who is trained as a physicist and who is now working in computer science and is from Hungary.

We are very much looking forward to hearing talks at the conference and Dr. Qiang and I will be giving a paper on Wednesday on knowledge collaboration networks. This paper is published in the conference proceedings volume, which we picked up today.

We thank the organizers of SBP 2010 for the opportunity to present the tutorial and for organizing such an exciting composition of speakers and presentations!