Scientia is an institute of Rice University faculty founded in 1981 by the mathematician and historian of science Salomon Bochner. Scientia provides an opportunity for scholarly discussion across disciplinary boundaries; its members and fellows come from a wide-range of academic disciplines.
Networks are ubiquitous and deeply enmeshed in our daily lives. Their systematic study extends back to Euler's work in the late 18 th century and includes the familiar "six degrees of separation", "small worlds" and "tipping point" insights of recent decades. Network imagery, restricted to transport and communication only a century ago, has expanded dramatically to describe social interactions, cellular and genetic processes, disease transmission, and power grids, among other diverse phenomena. Most recently, the concept of scale-free networks has opened the floodgates of research aimed at understanding networks as complex, dynamic, and evolving in accordance with fundamental laws that appear to apply equally well to cells, computers, and society. Scientia's colloquium series this year considers not only the ways in which networks are changing our lives, but also how insights into the operation and architecture of networks may generate new solutions to a wide variety of problems.
Related Link: http://videolectures.net/eccs07_dresden/
Videos of the presentations on networks at the 2007 European Conference on Complex Systems
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Connexions
"Networks of Knowledge"
The last 15 years have seen major shifts in the nature of knowledge production and circulation. The Internet has enabled new modes of authorship, new forms of open licensing and distribution, and new forms of collaboration and peer production to flourish. New online education projects, scientific journals, and reference works have rapidly gained critical mass. But in turn, new anxieties have arisen concerning the long-term sustainability and quality assurance of these enterprises. In this talk, we will review the past, present, and several potential futures of Internet-enabled scholarly publication with a particular emphasis on the global open-access movement.
4:00 p.m., McMurtry Auditorium,
Duncan Hall, Rice University
(reception after colloquium)
Lecture is free and open to the public.