Another odd notion of complex systems from this CFP and conference announcement.

"Examples of complex networks are found in living organisms, in engineering systems, as well as in social networks. Most of the real-world systems have the required degree of complexity to be called "complex systems".

Hunh?

This makes it sound like you need to add just a pinch of ‘complex’ to a complicated system or network to really be able to call it a ‘complex system.’ Hmmmn.

Complexity is not some ingredient. It is not measured with a ‘required degree’ like a tablespoon of sugar in some cookie recipe…

• Saying complexity is “…almost ubiquitous…”  might be the same as saying a ‘little bit pregnant’
• Recall, simplicity is not the opposite of complexity; simplicity is an important property of complex systems.
• “Simplex” is not a portmanteau of simple and complex; simplex is simplex.

And so forth and so on…

Besides these semantic gaffs, or stuff lost-in-translation, both the direction and activities of the workshop are solid.

[download]

Call for Participation

SIMPLEX 2011: 3rd Annual Workshop on Simplifying Complex Networks for Practitioners

24th June 2011, Minneapolis, USA

http://www.simplexconf.net

Co-located with IEEE ICDCS 2011

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*Scope of the workshop*

Network science, sometimes also called "complex networks science", has recently attracted much attention from the scientific community, mainly due to the almost ubiquitous presence of complex networks in real-world systems. Examples of complex networks are found in living organisms, in engineering systems, as well as in social networks. Most of the real-world systems have the required degree of complexity to be called "complex systems". Complexity may have to do with the intricate dynamics of the interacting components, with the non-trivial properties of the underlying network topology, or with the sheer size of the system itself.

Despite the numerous workshops and conferences related to network science, it is still a set of loosely interacting communities. Those communities would benefit from better interactions.

Simplex aims at triggering different computer science communities (e.g., communication networks, distributed systems) to propose research areas and topics that should be tackled from the network science perspective. We also seek contributions from network science that are relevant to solve practical computer science problems. Two types of contributions are foreseen from prospective authors. The first type would consist of use-cases of theoretical tools and methods to solve practical problems. Such contributions should be as usable as possible by practitioners in the related field. The second type of contributions would come from practitioners that have identified a problem that may be solved by tools from network sciences. The point of such contributions is to make the network sciences community aware of the importance of a high-impact problem, and to suggest means by which the problem may be solved by the network science community. Both contributions should stimulate interaction between theoreticians and practitioners, and also have high potential impact in either field.

Topics for the workshop include, but are not limited to:

- Application of complex network theory to the design of distributed and mobile systems;

- Data mining of large scale networks;

- Analysis of dynamic and time-varying networks;

- Network robustness to failures and attacks;

- Machine learning and network science;

- Complex network theory applied to forwarding/routing problems

- Application of social network analysis to communication and computing system design;

- Mobility and connectivity modeling;

- Network science and data&information retrieval;

- Complex network theory and security applications.

*Organization*

General Chairs

Pan Hui, Deutsche Telekom Laboratories/ TU Berlin, Germany Steve Uhlig, Deutsche Telekom Laboratories/ TU Berlin, Germany

PC Chairs

Mirco Musolesi University of St Andrews, UK My Thai University of Florida, USA

Web Chair

Fehmi Ben Abdesslem University of St Andrews, UK

Steering Committee

Jon Crowcroft University of Cambridge, UK Steve Uhlig Deutsche Telekom Laboratories/ TU Berlin, Germany Pan Hui Deutsche Telekom Laboratories/ TU Berlin, Germany Walter Willinger AT&T Research, USA

Technical Program Committee

Frédéric Amblard University of Toulouse, France Vincent Blondel Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium Ulrik Brandes, University of Konstanz, Germany Dirk Brockmann Northwestern University, USA Meeyoung Cha KAIST, Korea Richard Clegg University College London, UK Shlomi Dolev Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel Moez Draief Imperial College London, UK Jesus Gomez-Gardenes  University Rey Juan Carlos, Spain Alexander-Sasha Gutfraind Cornell University, USA Renaud Lambiotte Imperial College London, UK Thomas Karagiannis Microsoft Research Cambridge Vassilis Kostakos University of Madeira, Portugal and CMU, USA Massimo Marchiori University of Padova, Italy Cecilia Mascolo University of Cambridge, UK Alan Mislove Northeastern University, USA Raul Mondragon Queen Mary, University of London, UK Maziar Nekovee University College London, UK Arun Sen Arizona State University, USA

Duc Tran University of Massachusetts Boston, USA 

Jie Wang University of Massachusetts Lowell, USA 

Dapeng Oliver Wu University of Florida USA

Lei Ying Iowa State University, USA      

Zhi-Li Zhang University of Minnesota, USA

Ben Zhao University of California at Santa Barbara, USA 

*Registration*

The ICDCS’11 conference registration includes the SIMPLEX’11 workshop registration. There is a single registration for all the ICDCS activities.

See also:

https://www.icdcs-registration.com/icdcs11/

*Program*

Session 1: Social Networks

9:30 – 10:00

Understanding Graph Sampling Algorithms for Social Network Analysis Tianyi Wang, Long Jin, Beixing Deng, Xing Li (Tsinghua University, China), Yang Chen, Tianyin Xu (University of Goettingen, Denmark), Zengbin Zhang (University of California-Santa Barbara, USA), Pan Hui (Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, Germany)

10:00 – 10:30

Preserving Social Locality in Data Replication for Online Social Networks Khanh Nguyen, Cuong Pham, Duc A. Tran (University of Massachusetts, Boston, USA), Feng Zhang (Distributed System Infrastructure Group, EMC Corp, USA)

Coffee break 10:30 – 11:00

Session 2: Network Structures

11:00 – 11:30

k-clique Communities in the Internet AS-level Topology Graph Luciano Lenzini, Enrico Gregori, Chiara Orsini (Università Di Pisa, Italy)

11:30 – 12:00    

Link-level Network Topology Generation

Mehmet Burak Akgun, Mehmet Gunes (University of Nevada, Reno, USA)

Lunch 12:00 – 1:30

Session 3: Robustness and Trustworthy Computing

1:30 – 2:00

A Geometric Approach to Robustness in Complex Networks Gyan Ranjan, Zhi-Li Zhang (University of Minnesota, USA)

2:00 – 2:30 Understanding Social Networks Properties for Trustworthy Computing

Abedelaziz Mohaisen, Huy Tran, Nicholas Hopper, Yongdae Kim (University of Minnesota, USA)

Coffee break 2:30 – 3:00    

Session 4: Modelling Network Influence and System Behavior

3:00 – 3:30

Approximation and Inapproximation for the Influence Maximization Problem in Social Networks under Deterministic Linear Threshold Model Zaixin Lu, Wei Zhang, Weili Wu (University of Texas–Dallas, USA), Bin Fu (University of Texas-Pan American, USA)

3:30 – 4:00

Finding a "Kneedle" in a Haystack: Detecting Knee Points in System Behavior Ville Satopaa, Jeannie Albrecht (William College, USA), David Irwin (University of Massachusetts-Amherst, USA), Barath Raghavan (University of California, Berkeley, USA)

General Discussion 4:00 – 5:00     

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Mirco Musolesi

School of Computer Science, University of St. Andrews Jack Cole Building, North Haugh, St. Andrews KY16 9SX United Kingdom

Web: http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~mirco