Events
Past Event
NICO DECEMBER SEMINAR: Scott Feld, Purdue University "Finding Highly Connected Nodes in Networks: The Power of Common Friends"
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
11:00 AM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details
Speaker:
Scott Feld, Professor of Sociology, Purdue University
Title:
Finding Highly Connected Nodes in Networks: The Power of Common Friends
Abstract:
This paper extends the Friendship Paradox – where friends have more friends than random people do, on average – to the more general phenomenon that mutual friends have more friends than friends do, on average. We show that we can find people who who are friends of multiple people in practical sized random samples in one regional Facebook network of 63,392 people with an average of 24 friends each, where people with two friends in a random sample have an average of 212 friends overall, with three friends have an average of 391 friends, etc. We further illustrate this general network phenomenon by taking random samples of citations from 79,034 journal articles. We find that a source cited by two articles in a random sample has an average of 461 citations, placing it in the top 0.01% in numbers of citations among all sources cited by these articles. We provide a general expression for the expected overall number of friends of a person found to have k friends in a random sample from a population with a given distribution of numbers of friends. We show that the effectiveness of using common friends among random samples for finding highly connected nodes is most pronounced when there are nodes with a great disproportion of the ties, as seems to be both typical and important for many types of social and other networks, such as where there are superspreaders of diseases, mega-influencers on the Internet, and highly connected central nodes in centralized neural networks. We discuss further implications, applications, and directions for further research.
Speaker Bio:
Scott Feld served as Assistant to Full Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook from 1975-1991. He then served as Professor of Sociology at Louisiana State University from 1991 until 2004, and joined the faculty at Purdue University in 2004. He has published over sixty articles, including twelve published in the most prestigious journals in the fields of Sociology and Political Science. His ongoing research interests involve 1) causes and consequences of patterns in social networks, 2) processes of individual and collective decision making, and 3) applications of sociology, most recently including innovations in marriage and divorce laws (covenant marriage). He regularly teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on social networks, research methods, and statistics.
Location:
In person: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Remote option: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/91453237911
Passcode: NICO2024
Time
Tuesday, December 3, 2024 at 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
WED@NICO SEMINAR: Blaise Aguera y Arcas, Google "Symbiogenesis, Computational Parallelism, and Complexity in Evolution"
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details
Speaker:
Blaise Agüera y Arcas, VP/Fellow, CTO of Technology & Society, Google
Title:
Symbiogenesis, Computational Parallelism, and Complexity in Evolution
Abstract:
Symbiogenesis-- the fusion of formerly independent self-replicating entities into a larger self-replicating entity-- is proposed as the driving force behind evolution's "arrow of time" toward ever-increasing complexity. We'll explore an Artificial Life system as a minimal motivating example, then discuss the implications for biological evolution beyond the "standard" accounts of Major Evolutionary Transitions and "intelligence explosions" in brainy species. Energetic and computational implications will also be addressed.
Speaker Bio:
Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a VP and Fellow at Google, where he is the CTO of Technology & Society and founder of Paradigms of Intelligence (Pi). Pi is an organization working on fundamental research in AI and related fields, especially the foundations of neural computing, active inference, sociality, evolution, and Artificial Life.
In 2008, Blaise was awarded MIT’s TR35 prize. During his tenure at Google, Blaise has innovated on-device machine learning for Android and Pixel; invented Federated Learning, an approach to decentralized model training that avoids sharing private data; and founded the Artists + Machine Intelligence program.
An External Professor at Santa Fe Institute and a frequent public speaker, Blaise has given multiple TED talks and keynoted NeurIPS. He has also authored numerous papers, essays, op-eds, and chapters, as well as two previous books, Who Are We Now? and Ubi Sunt. His most recent book, What Is Life?, is part 1 of the larger book What Is Intelligence?, forthcoming from Antikythera and MIT Press in September 2025.
Location:
In person: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Remote option: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/98741396308
Passcode: NICO25
About the Speaker Series:
Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems, data science and network science. It brings together attendees ranging from graduate students to senior faculty who span all of the schools across Northwestern, from applied math to sociology to biology and every discipline in-between. Please visit: https://bit.ly/WedatNICO for information on future speakers.
Time
Wednesday, November 12, 2025 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
Data Science Nights - November 2025 - Speaker: Feihong Xu, ESAM
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
5:30 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details
NOVEMBER MEETING: Thursday, November 20, 2025 at 5:30pm (US Central)
LOCATION:
In person: Chambers Hall, Lower Level
600 Foster Steet, Evanston Campus
AGENDA:
5:30pm - Meet and greet with refreshments
6:00pm - Talk with Feihong Xu, Amaral Lab, ESAM
Talk title and abstract TBA.
DATA SCIENCE NIGHTS are monthly meetings featuring presentations and discussions about data-driven science and complex systems, organized by Northwestern University graduate students and scholars. Students and researchers of all levels are welcome! For more information: http://bit.ly/nico-dsn
Time
Thursday, November 20, 2025 at 5:30 PM - 7:30 PM
Location
Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
Data Science Nights - December 2025 - Speaker: Yash Chainani, Chemical Engineering
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
5:30 PM
//
Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details
DECEMBER MEETING: Thursday, December 18, 2025 at 5:30pm (US Central)
LOCATION:
In person: Chambers Hall, Lower Level
600 Foster Steet, Evanston Campus
AGENDA:
5:30pm - Meet and greet with refreshments
6:00pm - Talk with Yash Chainani, Broadbelt & Tyo Labs, Chemical Engineering
Talk title and abstract TBA.
DATA SCIENCE NIGHTS are monthly meetings featuring presentations and discussions about data-driven science and complex systems, organized by Northwestern University graduate students and scholars. Students and researchers of all levels are welcome! For more information: http://bit.ly/nico-dsn
Time
Thursday, December 18, 2025 at 5:30 PM - 7:30 PM
Location
Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)