What happens at ECMI stays at ECMI

I just got back from NetSci at 12:30 am this morning and I will head off tomorrow for another conference. (A quick piece of advice: Attempting to go to back-to-back conferences is a very bad idea. I already feel quite exhausted...) This time the conference is in the ECMI series. By the way, there is no truth to the rumor that ECMI, which stands for "The European Consortium For Mathematics In Industry", has Wile E. Coyote as its mascot. (Also, I'm not sure whether or not there will be any super geniuses at the conference...)

For this conference, I was asked to organize a session on mathematics and social networks. The main message I want to send is that this is an exciting frontier for the mathematical scientists. For this particular meeting, I will also be stressing as part of my message the increasing important and prevalence of this stuff in industrial problems (such as for online recommendation systems), though I'll concentrate on my own research for the bulk of my talk. I will also give a talk about my work on wave propagation in granular lattices as part of a session on asymptotic analysis.

By the way, NetSci was a very good conference. (I gave a talk on my Congressional research there.) I acquired some awesome new data on political cabinet networks and will be collaborating with Brian Uzzi from Northwestern's business school (in addition to some of the usual math/physics crowd) in studying it. (Brian was already working with some Oxford folks, so I got to meet with him and talk with him a couple of times at the meeting. He gave a great invited presentation that included references to both Wang Chung and the Traveling Wilburys. Dude!) I'm not as well-known in networks as in the applied math/nonlinear dynamics community, but things seem to be on the upswing here as well. (FYI: More important is that those who do know me respect my work...)

On the way back from NetSci, a delay for one train, cause me to miss the last connection at Birmingham New Street. I then walked 5 minutes to a nearby station so that I could visit a couple of extra nodes in Britain's train network and finally get home. I made it to my apartment at 12:30 --- about 2 hours later than planned, but at least I made it and could sleep in my own bed. During this ordeal, it occurred to me that my knowledge of British geography is almost entirely network-based. I basically think of how I can get from one city to another almost entirely based on how I how between different nodes of the network. I have figured out a little bit about how this network is embedded in two-dimensional space, but I know far more about travel in Britain along the network. This can occasionally cause mistakes on my part because the embeddedness in two-dimensional space of the network is quite important (as Mark Newman and Michael Gastner have stressed in several papers over the last couple of years).