This workshop support award is for the bi-annual meeting on complex networks "Network Frontier Workshop" to be held at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, December 4-6 2013. The meeting will bring together a diverse group of experts in complementary areas of network science, dynamical systems, and complex systems, with substantial emphasis given to topics that cut across disciplinary boundaries. Participants will include experts both in theory and in applications as well as students and postdoctoral researchers. They will, in addition, participate in discussions about future directions that are likely to lead to transformative research. The program will include tutorials, presentations by young researchers, and discussions about career opportunities, in addition to research talks by leading experts in the field.
In this workshop, presenters will report recent results in the area of network science and related applications. Participants will become aware of the latest results in their respective subfields, and will also be able to discuss with other experts in an interdisciplinary environment. This is expected to generate new insights and stimulate new interdisciplinary collaborations. In addition, the workshop will involve activities jointly organized with the Northwestern SIAM Student Chapter, which will include tutorials by experts, presentations by students and postdoctoral researchers, and discussions about career opportunities. The participation of early-career researchers will also help promote the transfer of expertise to the next generation of engineers, physicists, and mathematicians.
This grant supported the second edition of the Network Frontier Workshop, a scientific meeting focused on network dynamics held at Northwestern University from December 4 through 6, 2013. The workshop was a tremendous success in highlighting leading-edge research on complex networks and in providing opportunities for young researchers and researchers from underrepresented groups. Intellectual Merit: At the meeting, participants working on innovative aspects of complex systems research communicated recent results and ideas relevant to fields as diverse as brain, climate, and socio-technological research. Presentations included both theory and applications of nonlinear dynamics and statistical physics in the context of synchronization, cascades, transportation, control, and failure recovery in complex dynamical systems. The meeting was run in a single session to facilitate interactions between different subfields. The first day of the meeting was dedicated to tutorials and presentations from young researchers. The second and third days were focused mainly on talks from invited speakers. A poster session was held on the second day. Four special talks were also held throughout the meeting: a lunch talk, an evening talk, a poster-session talk, and a colloquium jointly organized with the Department of Physics and Astronomy of Northwestern University. In total, the meeting included 49 talks and 15 poster presentations. Broader Impacts: The Workshop was attended by 94 participants from 12 different countries, of which 34 were students, 24 were postdoctoral researchers, and 36 were faculty members. Six of the 18 invited participants were women, leading to a total of 18 female participants. In addition to the non-local invited speakers, 36 contributed participants received partial support to attend the meeting, in the form of waived registration fee, lodging support and/or transportation support. The supported contributed participants included 20 students and 14 postdoctoral researchers. Effort was made to engage the community: the lunch talk mentioned above was open to the Northwestern SIAM Student Chapter members and the colloquium was open to the public. Therefore, diversity and education were at the center of our event.
