Left: One school is illustrated in the figure below where the colours correspond to the race of the kids. This work has been discused in PhysOrg and this then commented in the blog. Right: Networks of communities from the same school, size of nodes represent the number of kids in each community, they are colored according to the race of the majority |
Networks of Mobile Agents:
The topological features of social networks fundamentally differ from other networks. First, they are single-scale and show small-world properties. Second, they are divided into groups or communities. Additionally, while those networks are time evolving, their evolution process differ from standard growth models as those that govern networks such as the World Wide Web, or from the copying mechanisms proposed for biological networks. I showed that applying a mobile agent approach is a very convenient way of generating social network models [n1, n2]. The origin of the properties described by these models can be traced back to the very presence of communities, derived from the fluctuations in the number of individuals in an abstract representation of a social space. My proposed approach established an interesting bridge between the developments of granular gas theory and the modeling of complex networks.
Social Network Analysis:
I have worked on the development of tools for the analysis of complex networks. In the case of bi-partite networks, coming from sexual contact data, I defined a clustering coefficient C4 based on squares or cycles of size four, as a complement to the standard C3 coefficient based on triangles [n3]. Many studies on network characterization have been based on structural analyses in terms of their connectivity patterns. In some scenarios the attributes of the nodes play a crucial role. Patterns of friendship between individuals, for example, are strongly affected, by factors such as language, race, and the age of the individuals in question. Comparing empirical networks to their randomized versions, I worked on the development of an appropriate method to quantify the degree of racial segregation in the analyzed sample of friendship networks [n4].
