The award supports the "International Workshop and Conference on Network Science," to be held at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, during May 2006. The primary objective of these activities is to facilitate interactions among social and behavioral scientists and the many new disciplines interested in and utilizing network science. The Workshop and Conference will bring together leading researchers and practitioners in network science --- analysts, modeling experts, and visualization specialists --- with graduate students from many different research areas for interdisciplinary communication and collaboration. The Workshop will feature tutorials focusing on a variety of network science research areas. The Workshop will lead into the Conference, which will feature intellectual discourses and conference presentations from the invited graduate students.
For network research to achieve its potential impact on scientific research, students and faculty need to be broadly trained in this area, learning not only the basic measurement and modeling tools but also their meaning and range of applicability. The Workshop will provide cross training in the theory and methods of network science, incorporating the perspectives of diverse disciplines such as sociology, organizational science, information science, mathematics, statistics, informatics, biology, and physics. By bringing together leading researchers and emerging network scholars, the Workshop and the Conference will also promote the development of new mathematical and statistical models with broad application in the social and behavioral sciences. Dissemination products include an easily accessible website containing tutorials and invited and contributed papers. This award was supported as part of the fiscal year 2005 Mathematical Sciences priority area special competition on Mathematical Social and Behavioral Sciences (MSBS).
