Network Science: From the Web to the Cell

northeastern University/Harvard Medical School

Highly interconnected networks with amazingly complex structure de-scribe systems as diverse as the World Wide Web, our cells, social systems or the economy. In the past decade we learned that most of these networks are the result of self-organizing processes governed by simple but generic laws, resulting in architectural features that makes them much more similar to each other than one would have expected by chance. I will discuss the recurring patterns of our interconnected world and its implications to network robustness and spreading processes.