ISyE Seminar Series: Mark Newman
"Message passing methods for networks"
Presentation by Mark Newman
Anatol Rapoport Distinguished University Professor of Physics
University of Michigan
3:30 pm - Virtual Seminar
About the seminar:
Many systems of interest to science can be represented usefully as networks or graphs, including technological, social, and biological networks, but the resulting networks are very sparse. Standard spectral and linear algebra methods can perform poorly when applied to such networks. Message passing methods offer an alternative which works well in the sparse limit and which can also provide new analytic insights. This talk will introduce the message passing method through a series of examples and illustrate how the method can be used for a wide range of calculations of network structure and function. Among other things, the talk will touch upon the calculation of percolation properties, graph spectra, and community structure, the deep connections between message passing and structural phase transitions in networks, and a new solution to the long-standing problem of message passing on networks with a high density of short loops.
Bio:
Mark Newman received his PhD in physics from Oxford University in 1991 and conducted postdoctoral research at Cornell University before taking a position at the Santa Fe Institute, a think-tank in New Mexico devoted to the study of complex systems. In 2002 he left Santa Fe for the University of Michigan, where he is currently the Anatol Rapoport Distinguished University Professor of Physics and a professor in the university's Center for the Study of Complex Systems. Among other honors, Professor Newman is a Fellow of Royal Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Physical Society, he has been a Simons Foundation Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow, and was winner of the ISI Lagrange Prize in 2014 and the Network Science Society Euler Prize in 2021. He is the author of over 180 scientific publications and seven books, including "Networks", an introduction to the field of network theory, and "The Atlas of the Real World", a popular book on cartography.