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Fall 2021
Shahram Jahani
Network Science
CNT5805
 Instructor: Shahram Jahani, Ph.D.
Email: shahram.jahani@ucf.edu
Class Meeting: MW 6:00PM -7:15PM
Room : ENG1 383

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Office hours: Sat 11:30AM - 1:00PM

(Online- Zoom meeting)

Teacher Assistant: TBA

 Overview
• We study network science to better understand and solve
complex problems, i.e., problems composed of a high degree of
interconnected parts.

• Some examples of complex problems that do not have simple

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solutions:
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• opioid addiction, cyberwarfare, world hunger, global warming, fake news,

…….

weather forecasting, etc.).

• The term network science (NS) is emerging as an interdisciplinary

field.
• including physics, mathematics, computer science, biology, economics, and
sociology.

• In NS, we will develop explanatory models to understand the

emergence of networks, predictive models to anticipate the
evolution of a phenomenon, and other models to optimize the
outcomes of networks.
 Course Goal

• The goal of this course is to understand and to become adept

at using NS concepts and principles.

• The expectation is for you to apply them to solve

Course Goal
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class-assigned and the real-world problems.

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• in addition, you will become proficient at reading and

reporting on current research in the field.
 Course Objectives

• The design of the course: for students pursuing an advanced degree

in data analytics.

• The expectation: to learn the mathematics of networks, data analysis,

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visualization, and the application of these concepts across problems from
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multiple disciplines.
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What the students will investigate ongoing research in the field

of network science. This includes:
• the retrieval of peer-reviewed literature
• and preparing reports and what the research found.
• and the application of the knowledge gain in the research will
be applied towards the final class project consisting of a real
world data.
 Required Textbook
• Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, “Network Science”, Cambridge University
Press, 2016

• http://networksciencebook.com/

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 Reference Materials

• M.E.J., Newman, :Networks: An Introduction”, Oxford

University Press,

• D. Easley and J. Kleinberg, “Networks, crowd and Markets”,

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Cambridge University Press,

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 General Class Policies
• All assignments and due dates will be posted on WebCourses and submissions
will be through the WebCourses upload feature.
• WebCourses contains the due dates for all graded material.

• Late submissions will result in a penalty.

• Failure to submit any assignment will result in an assignment grade of zero.

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• Should you need to reschedule an assignment due date because of
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a University approved function, notify me via email at least two weeks

prior to the assignment due date.
• You will need written documentation of such approved events.

• Should you miss a due date because of a serious illness or some other unforeseen
circumstances, inform me as soon as possible.

• It is student’s responsibility to make sure that his/her Knight's E-Mail and

WebCourses accounts work properly.
Important Dates

• Labor Day: Monday, September 6, 2021

• Thanksgiving: Thursday, November 25, 2021 - Saturday,
November 27, 2021

Exam/Quizzes
• Final Exam: Wednesday, December 8, 2021 4:00 PM –

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6:50 PM

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Syllabus Quiz
• In order to document that you began this course, The
students should take the "Syllabus Quiz" assignment by
5:00 pm on the Friday of the first week of classes or as
soon as possible after joining the class.

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• Failure to do so may result in a delay in the disbursement of

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financial aid.

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• You are required to complete this assignment even if you
are not receiving financial aid.
Attendance Policy
• Attendance at lecture is required, but will not be monitored or
tracked.
• If you miss a class you are still responsible for the material
covered.

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Academic Dishonesty
• Plagiarism and Cheating of any kind on an examination, quiz, or
assignment will result at least in an "0" for that assignment (and
may, depending on the severity of the case, lead to an "F" for the
entire course) and may be subject to appropriate referral to the
Office of Student Conduct for further action.

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• See the UCF Golden Rule

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(http://www.goldenrule.sdes.ucf.edu)
for further information.
Disability Statement
• Students with disabilities who need accommodations in this
course must contact the professor at the beginning of the
semester to discuss needed accommodations.

• No accommodations will be provided until the student has

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met with the professor to request accommodations.

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• Students who need accommodations must be registered with
Student Accessibility Services before requesting
accommodations from the professor.
• http://www.sds.ucf.edu/
• Student Resource Center Room 132,
• phone (407) 823-2371, TTY/TDD only phone (407) 823-
2116,
Copyright
• This course may contain copyright protected materials such as
audio or video clips, images, text materials, etc.
• These items are being used with regard to the Fair Use doctrine
in order to enhance the learning environment.

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• Do not copy, duplicate, download or distribute these items.

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• The use of these materials is strictly reserved your use only.

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• All copyrighted materials are credited to the copyright holder.

Note: The instructor reserves the right to modify this syllabus at any time.
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A Short Introduction

Science
Network

Introduction
 What is a NETWORK ?
• A NETWORK is, in its simplest form, a collection of points joined together in
pairs by lines.

• The field the points are referred to as vertices or nodes and the lines are
referred to as edges.
Topics
 What is a NETWORK ?
• A NETWORK is, in its simplest form, a collection of points joined together in
pairs by lines.
• The field the points are referred to as vertices or nodes and the lines are
referred to as edges.
Topics

WHY ARE WE INTERESTED IN NETWORKS ?

• Many objects of interest in the physical, biological, and social sciences can be
thought of as networks and, thinking of them in this way can often lead to
new and useful insights.
 Some Networks
• Internet : a collection of computers linked by data connections.

• Human societies: which are collections of people linked by acquaintance or

social interaction.

• Neural networks
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• Biochemical networks
 Internet
• It is a collection of computers linked by data connections.
• The best known and most widely studied
• A man-made and carefully engineered network
• we don’t know exactly what its structure is (Why?)
Topics

A visualization of the network structure of the Internet. Vertices

represent servers, and edges represent fiber-optic links..

Source: Image by the OPTE corporation

 Internet
• It is a collection of computers linked by data connections.
• The best known and most widely studied
• A man-made and carefully engineered network
• we don’t know exactly what its structure is

• Since it was built by many different groups of people

with only limited knowledge of each other’s actions
Topics

and little centralized control.

A visualization of the network structure of the Internet. Vertices

represent servers, and edges represent fiber-optic links..

Source: Image by the OPTE corporation

 Internet
• It is a collection of computers linked by data connections.
• The best known and most widely studied
• A man-made and carefully engineered network
• we don’t know exactly what its structure is

• Since it was built by many different groups of people

with only limited knowledge of each other’s actions
Topics

and little centralized control.

• Our best current data on its structure are derived

from experimental studies, rather than
from any central repository of knowledge
or coordinating authority.

A visualization of the network structure of the Internet. Vertices

represent servers, and edges represent fiber-optic links..

Source: Image by the OPTE corporation

 Internet
• Why we might want to study the network structure of the Internet.
Topics
 Internet
• Why we might want to study the network structure of the Internet.

• The function of the Internet is to transport data between computers (and

other devices) in different parts of the world.
• by dividing the data into pieces or packets
• and shipping them from vertex to vertex across the network until they
Topics

reach their intended destination.

 Internet
• Why we might want to study the network structure of the Internet.

• The function of the Internet is to transport data between computers (and

• other devices) in different parts of the world.
• by dividing the data into pieces or packets
• and shipping them from vertex to vertex across the network until they
Topics

reach their intended destination.

• The structure of the network will affect

how efficiently it accomplishes this
• function.
 Internet
• Why we might want to study the network structure of the Internet.

• If we know the network structure we can address many questions of practical

• relevance.
• How should we choose the route by which data are transported?
• Is the shortest route always necessarily the fastest?
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• If not, then what is, and how can we find it?

 Internet
• Why we might want to study the network structure of the Internet.

• If we know the network structure we can address many questions of practical

• relevance.
• How should we choose the route by which data are transported?
• Is the shortest route always necessarily the fastest?
Topics

• If not, then what is, and how can we find it?

• How can we avoid bottlenecks in the traffic flow that might slow things
down?
• What happens when a vertex or an edge fails (which they do with some
regularity)?
• How can we devise schemes to route around such failures?

• If we have the opportunity to add new capacity to the network, where

should it be added?
 Internet
• Why we might want to study the network structure of the Internet.

• It plays a central role in the development of new communications standards.

• New standards and protocols are continually being devised for communication
over the Internet, and old ones are revised.
Topics

• The parameters of these protocols are tuned for optimal performance with the
structure of the Internet in mind.
 Internet
• Why we might want to study the network structure of the Internet.

• It plays a central role in the development of new communications standards.

• New standards and protocols are continually being devised for communication
over the Internet, and old ones are revised.
Topics

• The parameters of these protocols are tuned for optimal performance with the
structure of the Internet in mind.

• In the early days of the network: primitive models of network structure were
employed in the tuning process.
• As better structural data become available: it becomes possible to better
understand and improve performance.
 WWW (World Wide Web)
• “Web” and “Internet” are often used interchangeably, but technically the
two are quite distinct.
Topics
 WWW (World Wide Web)
• “Web” and “Internet” are often used interchangeably, but technically the two
are quite distinct.
• The Internet is a physical network of computers linked by actual cables (or
sometimes radio links) running between them.
Topics
 WWW (World Wide Web)
• “Web” and “Internet” are often used interchangeably, but technically the two
are quite distinct.
• The Internet is a physical network of computers linked by actual cables (or
sometimes radio links) running between them.
Topics

• The Web, is a network of information stored on web pages.

• The vertices of the World Wide Web are web pages and the edges are
“hyperlinks,” the highlighted snippets of text or push-buttons on web pages
that we click on to navigate from one page to another.
 WWW (World Wide Web)
• “Web” and “Internet” are often used interchangeably, but technically the two
are quite distinct.
• The Internet is a physical network of computers linked by actual cables (or
sometimes radio links) running between them.
Topics

• The Web, is a network of information stored on web pages.

• The vertices of the World Wide Web are web pages and the edges are
“hyperlinks,” the highlighted snippets of text or push-buttons on web pages
that we click on to navigate from one page to another.

• A hyperlink is purely a software construct.

• There is no physical structure, like an optical fiber, that needs to be built
when you make a new link.
 WWW (World Wide Web)
• People tend
• to add hyperlinks between pages with related content, the link structure
of the Web reveals something about the content structure.

• to link more often to the useful pages.

• so that the number of links pointing to a page can be used as a
Topics

measure of its usefulness.

• A more sophisticated version of this idea lies behind the operation of
the popular Web search engine Google, as well as some others.
 WWW (World Wide Web)
• The Web also illustrates another concept of network theory, the directed
network .

• Hyperlinks on the Web run in one specific direction, from one web page to
another.
• Given an appropriate link on page A, you can click and arrive at page B.
Topics

• We can say that the edges in the World Wide Web are directed, running
from the linking page to the linked.
 The Topics Will be covered in this course

• Introduction - Chapter 1
• Foundations of Network Science
• Complex Systems
• History of Network Science
• Examples of Network Science
Topics

“I think the next century will be the century of complexity.”

Stephen Hawking
 The Topics Will be covered in this course

• Graph Theory - chapter 2

• network and graphs
• degrees
• network types
• paths, distances, lengths
Topics

• centrality measures, connectedness and

cluster coefficient
• network topologies
 The Topics Will be covered in this course

• Random networks - chapter 3

• Random network model
• links and degree distribution
• The binominal and Poisson distributions
• Evolution of random networks
Topics

• Small world phenomenon

• Watts – Strogatz model(“the rich get richer”)

Six degrees of separation (with Kavin Bacon)

Source: www.iceinstitute.org
 The Topics Will be covered in this course

• Scale free property - chapter 4

• random network versus power laws In statistics, a power law is a functional
• power loss and scale-free networks relationship between two quantities,
• Pareto’s Rule where a relative change in one quantity
results in a proportional relative change
• power law formulas in the other quantity,
Topics

• the largest hub

• slope of power law
• Universality
• Configuration Model
• Small world Behavior

Degree distribution for a network with 150000 vertices and mean degree = 6 created using the Barabási–Albert model (blue dots).
The distribution follows an analytical form given by the ratio of two gamma functions (black line) which approximates as a power-law.
 The Topics Will be covered in this course

• Barabasi-Albert Model – Chapter 5

• Growth
• Preferential Attachment
• Model Evolution
• Degree Distribution
Topics

• Goal: To understand why so different systems (as the WWW or the cell )
converge to a similar architecture.
 The Topics Will be covered in this course

Communities – Chapter 9
• Meaning and Examples
• Community Hypothesis
• Connectedness, density, and Cliques
• Strong and Weak Communities
Topics

• Graph Partitioning
• Community Detection
• Community Clustering
• Modularity Communities extracted from the call pattern of the
consumers of the largest Belgian mobile phone company.

• Goal: In network science we call a community a group of nodes that have a

higher likelihood of connecting to each other than to nodes from other
communities.
 The Topics Will be covered in this course

Evolving Networks – Chapter 6

• Barabasi-Albert Model vs Bianconi-Barabasi (BB) Models
• Fitness
• Degree Distribution
Topics

• Bose-Einstein Condensation
• Initial Attraction and Node Deletion

• Goal: How the differences in the node’s ability to acquire links affect
the network topology.
 The Topics Will be covered in this course

Network Robustness – Chapter 8

• Network Structure
• Percolation Theory
• Network Breakdown
Topics

• Robustness of Scale-free Networks

• Molloy-Reed Criterion

• Goal: Many natural and social systems have a remarkable ability to

sustain their basic functions even when some of their components
fail. Understanding the origins of this robustness is important for
many disciplines.
 The Topics Will be covered in this course

Spreading Phenomena – Chapter 10

• Introduction
• Network Epidemics
• Contact Networks
Topics

• Epidemic Prediction

• Goal: A network theorist will recognize super-spreaders as hubs. A

network-based approach to epidemic phenomena that allows us to
understand and predict the true impact of these hubs will be
introduced.