Li Wei

Born in October 10, 1974, I spent my undergraduate study in the physics department of CCNU, as a major in physics teaching. In 1996, I was recommended to the Institute of Particle Physics, which is dedicated to the theoretical and experimental research on heavy-ion collisions, to pursue a Master's degree. There, I was interested in problems on spin physics. After two years, I was given the opportunity to continue my study for a doctoral degree, which I obtained in June, 2001 from the Complexity Science Center (CSC) in Hua-Zhong (Central China) Normal University (CCNU), Wuhan, China. My advisor was Prof. X. Cai, the head of CSC. I am now a post-doctoral researcher at the Max-Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences.

One of my current research areas is self-organized criticality. Specifically, I am interested in avalanche dynamics embedded in, and scaling behaviors exhibited by, co-evolutionary processes of the biological community. I have observed a different hierarchy of avalanches by introducing a new quantity, average fitness, in the Bak-Sneppen (BS) evolution model. Theoretical and computational investigations of critical features of the new type of avalanches, e.g., critical values of thresholds, critical exponents, and scaling relations, etc., have been given. By exploiting master equation of the hierarchical processes, I have also provided analytical descriptions for under- and over-critical avalanches, scaling function, avalanche moments, and information measure of avalanche size distribution.

Another research interest of mine is on complex networks. One detailed example that I have studied is the airport network. Examining and analyzing the real data of China Airport Network (CAN), I found CAN displays the small-world characteristics shared by many other types of networks, i.e., a small diameter and a high clustering. Interesting studies also included: the degree distributions of CAN follow Double Pareto Law; the flight frequencies obey a power-law; there exists strong anti-correlations between the degrees of adjacent airports, etc. A more challenging and promising goal will be providing a detailed and practical method to evaluate the transportation efficiency of the airport network. In doing so, I find more concrete factors are needed to be considered.