Title: Discovering Functional Communities in Dynamical Networks
Cosma Shalizi, CMU

Abstract: Many networks are important because they are substrates for
dynamical systems, and their pattern of functional connectivity can
itself be dynamic --- they can functionally reorganize, even if their
underlying "anatomical" structure remains fixed.  However, the recent
rapid progress in discovering the community structure of networks has
overwhelmingly focused on that constant anatomical connectivity.  In
this talk, I will lay out the problem of finding _functional
communities_, and describe an approach to doing so.  This method
combines recent work on measuring information sharing across
stochastic networks with an existing and successful
community-discovery algorithm for weighted networks.  I illustrate it
with applications to both simulated and real networks.  (Joint work
with Marcelo Camperi and Kristina Klinkner.)

Bio: Cosma Shalizi studied physics at Cal-Berkeley (BA, 1993) and
Wisconsin-Madison (Ph.D., 2001).  He was a graduate fellow and
post-doc at the Santa Fe Institute, and a post-doc at the University
of Michigan's Center for the Study of Complex Systems.  Since 2005 he
has been an assistant professor of statistics at Carnegie Mellon
University.