SFI External Professors Jim Crutchfield and Raissa D’Souza are coordinating a working group at SFI this week that will consider the special problems of interconnected networks – in other words, networks of networks.
Participating experts range from nanodevice and power grid engineers to social network experimentalists. They will explore the behaviors of various heterogeneous networks and how they interconnect, evolve, and depend on one another.
Just as crucially, the group will be asking how and where to best control them.
“Time and again we’re caught off-guard by network failures, often because we’re unaware of the instabilities we inadvertently cause by coupling different networks together,” says Crutchfield, who focuses on information storage and processing in networks. “The working group’s task is to come up with control schemes to tamp down these instabilities.”
More information about the working group here.