Plenary Lecture

Modeling and Analysis of the Web-Like Networks

Professor Narsingh Deo
Nanjing Normal University
Nanjing, Jiangsu, China
E-mail: deo@cs.ucf.edu

Abstract: With the dramatic growth of the World Wide Web (Web) and the Internet, the study of large, random networks has acquired new prominence. Recent empirical studies have shown statistical similarities between these two and other complex, real-life networks such as the network of phone calls, power-distribution networks, citation network, science-collaboration network, movie-actor collaboration network, neural networks, and various infrastructure networks. The ubiquity and the increasing importance of such networks have spawned a truly cross-disciplinary research aimed at understanding their fundamental properties and functions.
Viewed as large, random graphs in which birth and death of nodes and links are taking place continuously, these graphs differ from the classical Erdos-Renyi random graphs in significant ways. Some of these differences have recently been discovered through empirical studies of the real-life networks; a great deal more remains to be discovered. In this talk we will present an overview of recently-proposed (by us and others) dynamic random graph models of these complex, large, real-life networks in a unified manner; explain salient techniques (graph-theoretic, statistical, and computational) used in analyzing these models; and discuss the main results derived through these techniques. For instance, how the structural properties of social networks facilitate or impede the spread of diseases, or how the properties of the Internet can be exploited to devise efficient strategies for containing the spread of viruses and worms.

Brief Biography of the Speaker:
Professor Narsingh Deo is known for his work in computational graph theory and in parallel algorithms. He holds the Charles N. Millican Eminent Scholar’s Chair in Computer Science and is the Director of the Center for Parallel Computation at University of Central Florida, Orlando. Prior to this, he was a Professor of Computer Science at Washington State University, where he also served as the department chair Before that he was a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and a Member of Technical Staff at Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He has a Ph.D. from Northwestern University, an MS from Caltech and an undergraduate degree from Indian Institute of Science—all in Electrical Engineering.
He has held Visiting professorships at numerous institutions--including at the University of Illinois, Urbana; University of Nebraska, Lincoln; Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore; and IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center, ETH, Zurich, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, Oak Ridge National Lab., Australian National University, Canberra, Chuo University, Tokyo, and IIT/Kharagpur.
A Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the ACM, and Fellow of the ICA, Dr. Deo has authored four books and about 200 refereed research papers. He holds a number of patents in computer hardware and is a recipient of NASA's Apollo Achievement Award. Among his other awards are: Gold Medal of Patna University; Drake Scholar at Caltech Governor's Award for Outstanding Contribution to High Tech Research in Florida (1989); UCF's Distinguished Researcher Award-89; UCF's Professorial Excellence Program Award (1997); UCF's Teaching Incentive Program Award (1999); and UCF’s Excellence in Graduate Teaching Award (2001). He has served as an editor/guest editor/ member of the editorial board for various journals--including the IEEE Trans. on Circuits & Systems, the Journal for Parallel and Distributed Computing; the Journal of Supercomputing, and the VLSI Design Journal. He is currently the president of the Forum for Interdisciplinary Mathematics.