Researchers and practitioners from around the world to come together

The Florida Institute of Technology Department of Computer Sciences will host the 3rd Workshop on Complex Networks March 7-9, 2012, to be chaired by Ronaldo Menezes, associate professor, College of Engineering. The international workshop brings together researchers and practitioners from around the world working on areas related to complex networks.

Examples of complex networks include the Internet, a wiring diagram of a food web and the metabolic system of a bacterium. Researchers, interested in understanding complex networks, are now beginning to unravel their structure and dynamics. The field has seen an exponential increase in the number of publications and brings together researchers from biology, mathematics, physics, sociology and epidemiology. It is this interdisciplinary nature of complex networks that the workshop aims to address.

Internationally recognized speakers attending include two keynote speakers. Award-winning Albert-László Barabási, distinguished university professor, Northeastern University, and director of the Center for Complex Network Research, will speak on March 7. In November 2011 his work made the cover of Popular Science magazine. The story was titled: "This Man Could Rule the World: How Albert-László Barabási went from mapping systems to controlling them."

Sinan Aral, New York University Stern School of Business assistant professor and Facebook scholar-in-residence, will also speak on March 7.

"Our research in the College of Engineering is internationally recognized. The direct benefit of this is the ability of our faculty to attract world-class researchers such as Albert-László Barabási to give keynote talks at Florida Tech hosted workshops," said College of Engineering Dean Fredric Ham.

Authors are encouraged to submit previously unpublished papers or abstracts on their research in complex networks. Both theoretical and applied papers are of interest. Accepted papers of registered authors will be featured in the workshop post-proceedings to be published by Springer-Verlag as a volume of the series of Studies in Computational Intelligence.