Raissa D'Souza (University of California, Davis; External Professor, Santa Fe Institute)
Abstract. Collections of networks are at the core of modern society, spanning technological, biological and social systems. Over the past decade a science of networks has been emerging and providing insights into the structure and function of many diverse types of systems, such as protein-interactions in a cell, collaboration networks of scientists, and the World Wide Web. Random graphs provide a framework for modeling network phenomena, especially phase transitions, such as the sudden emergence of large-scale connectivity. This talk will give an overview and present a variant of the classic Erdos-Renyi model of network formation (using the power of two choices), showing that we can alter the location and also the nature of the phase transition, making for an explosive onset of connectivity. We also develop random graph models of interacting networks, motivated by the fact that individual networks are increasingly interdependent (e.g., the Internet and the power grid, globalization of financial markets). We show that interactions between different types of networks can actually lower critical thresholds and provide stabilizing effects with respect to cascades.
Bio. Raissa D’Souza is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Davis, as well as an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Her research focuses on mathematical models of self-organization, phase transitions, and the structure and function of networked systems. Raissa received a PhD in Statistical Physics from MIT in 1999, then was a postdoctoral fellow, first in Fundamental Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Bell Laboratories, and then in the Theory Group at Microsoft Research. Her interdisciplinary work on network theory has appeared in journals such as Science, PNAS, and Physical Review Letters, and her research has been funded by the NSF, the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, DOD, ARL and AFOSR. Raissa has been selected a Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences four times and is a member of the Science Steering Committee of the Santa Fe Institute. She has served on the program committees for numerous conferences, including the European Conference on Complex Systems, the 9th Workshop on Algorithms and Models for the Web Graph (WAW’12), and the upcoming "Power Grids and Complex Networks" workshop. When not pursuing research ideas, she can typically be found outside, either scaling rocks or sailing.