CS 1699 / CS 3150 Fall 2014

Title: Networks, Crowds and Markets


      

Corporate Email Communication Network                                 High School Dating Network                             Prediction Market for 2008 Presidential Election                    Trails of Flikr Users in Manhattan





Instructor: Kirk Pruhs

Email: kirk@cs.pitt.edu

Phone : 412-624-8844

Course Description

     The plan is to cover essentially all of the text Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World By David Easley and Jon Kleinberg. The text was the winner of the 2011 Fredrick W. Lanchester Prize for the best contribution to operations research and the management sciences published in English. Much of the text is targeted at a more general audience than upper level mathematical science sstudents, so we will cover the advanced portions of the text,  as well as potentially some supplemental material. The blurb from the web site:

In recent years there has been a growing public fascination with the complex "connectedness" of modern society. This connectedness is found in many incarnations: in the rapid growth of the Internet and the Web, in the ease with which global communication now takes place, and in the ability of news and information as well as epidemics and financial crises to spread around the world with surprising speed and intensity. These are phenomena that involve networks, incentives, and the aggregate behavior of groups of people; they are based on the links that connect us and the ways in which each of our decisions can have subtle consequences for the outcomes of everyone else.

Networks, Crowds, and Markets combines different scientific perspectives in its approach to understanding networks and behavior. Drawing on ideas from economics, sociology, computing and information science, and applied mathematics, it describes the emerging field of study that is growing at the interface of all these areas, addressing fundamental questions about how the social, economic, and technological worlds are connected.

Syllabus


Prerequisites:

Technically, the prerequisite is consent of the instructor. Ideally I would like students to have done reasonably well (say a grade of B or better) in CS 1502 or some class involving mathematical proofs, and who are enthusiastic about learning. If you would like permission to register for the course, send me an email with:


Schedule: