I, Saptarshi Pal, would like to state my interest in being considered for the PhD Programme

in Network Science at Northeastern University. My research interests primarily lie in

studying the field of mathematical modelling of complex interconnected real - world
systems which involves qualitative as well as a deeper theoretical understanding of the
nature of interaction between the participants in the network and deriving (or predicting)
the global behaviour of the networked system from knowledge of its local interactions.

The growth of liking for such a specific sector in the study of Network Science was very
gradual for my case. During my early years of undergraduate studies, I was introduced to
the world of research in Complex Networks when I started working in the research group at
our university led by Prof. Mrinal Kanti Naskar and Dr. Amitava Mukherjee (members and
ex-members of our department). Although the tacit and long term goals of the research
group is to solve a fairly engineering problem of designing a robust, reliable and congestion -
free communication network (more specifically a backbone network of a communication
network) that can handle the large data volume per user as per today's demands, it was
imperative to view the problem from the perspective of basic sciences and study the
relevant approaches from the field of Network Science.

During that time I went through a lot of scientific articles on these topics, many of which
were written by faculties who are currently associated with the Network Science Institute at
Northeastern University, while familiarizing and updating myself with their works and
sometimes the outline of their works. As a derivative of Professor Barabasi's seminal work in
2011 titled "Controllability of Complex Networks", we wrote a paper from our group in 2015
named "O(N^2) Heuristic for estimation of Driver Nodes for the Controllability of Directed
Complex Network" for the Conference of LSCNA [cite here]. Also, later in 2016, I, as a part of
my group presented our work titled "Non Autonomous Complex Network with Gamma
Distribution" at the NetSci Conference in 2016 [Cite here] where we dealt with inferring
about the resultant degree distribution in Complex Networks borne out of simultaneous
growth and decay processes. Later as a part of my group, I also tried to model the growth of
the backbone communication network along the lines of the Bianconi - Barabasi Model
where always the highest degree node is not the most preferential choice of attachment for
an incoming node. We observed that the preference of a node, in this case is in fact, quite
intuitively, a function of other factors too, namely the various network performance
measures, the cumulative effect of which we tried to define as the node's "fitness".
Although, personally, this was a very promising approach to the problem, considering the
interesting observations from the data, I couldn't theoretically develop it any further and
hence we failed to present it as a concrete paper. The earlier problems, although having
faint correlation with the long term goals of our group, were very potent in exciting me and
encouraging me to pursue research in this domain. My advisors were also very flexible and
keen to let me work independently in problems that motivated me.
Till then, the projects and the problem statements I had been involved with were mostly
defined be us. The goals were set at the group meetings by our advisors after judging the
importance of those problems in context to our central goal. I believe that although I played
a very central role in choosing what problem to work in, my efforts in solving them, however
sincere, were limited by my lack of expertise in the field. Since I am deeply fascinated by the
field, the paucity of a structured learning procedure in my quest for understanding the
depths of this nascent yet rapidly expanding subject has always made me crave for
attending a methodical course in it before delving into solving the really challenging
problems of the domain, something which is possible under the tutelage of the faculties and
the groups at Northeastern University in highest quality.

But the love for mathematically modelling complex systems comes from my experience as a
summer research intern as a DAAD WISE fellow (for 2017) at the Max Planck Institute for
Dynamics and Self - Organization, Göttingen under Professor Marc Timme. As a part of the
'Ecobus' [cite here] project there, I had to model a complex real - time demand responsive
dynamic ride sharing system of cabs (very similar to Uber or Lyft) in order to derive the
scalability of the system. The goal was to show that rejections by the cabs (due to failure in
meeting specific time constraints for demands) scaled non - linearly as a function of number
of transporters and density of demand pattern - something that we had observed from both
simulations and New York taxi cab data. As I was mostly interested in finding the steady
state distribution of occupancy of cabs, that were picking up demands and dropping them
off both temporally and spatially, I modelled the system as a network of interdependent
queues and found interesting mathematical predictions about rejections versus number of
transporters and also versus number of seats in each car. Due to the large number of
dependencies between the temporal and the spatial parameters involved in the problem, it
was great challenge for me to form a proper stochastic model, only based on queuing
theory, for the mathematical analysis for the system. Professor Marc and I are currently
writing a paper on it.

Working on this project has inspired me to investigating and working more on problems that
involve the mathematical modelling of socio - technical systems during the course of my
PhD at Northeastern University. The philosophical motivation behind the desire to work in
this domain is the satisfaction to predict and analyze the behaviour of counterintuitive social
systems in an accurate way, and devise methods to control them from those information by
external inputs, if such a phenomenon or system is required to remain under restrictive
boundaries. My interest for working with large data sets in such problems is also one of the
primary reason I want to be a part of the groups at Northeastern University that work with
theoretical models as well as efficient computational tools to derive information from large
sets. The work at the GLEAM model (Global Epidemic and Mobility Model) at the MOBS lab
at Network Science institute