2015 AAAS Annual Meeting (12-16 February 2015)

February 12 - 16, 2015

Insights from Social Networks: Visualizing Big Data from Cells to Cell Phones to Societies

This symposium will explore how network analysis is opening up new ways of looking at the emerging large datasets of how and why agents are linked to other agents. Social network theory took shape when examining connections among people in human societies. The notion of small world networks and the six degrees of separation as well as the idea that it is not simply who one knows, but also who those individuals know, underlies Google’s algorithms of page rank and the popular concept of “networking.” With the application of social network techniques to animal systems in behavior, ecology, and neuroscience, insights into functional significance of different social structures is emerging. The appearance of large datasets and sophisticated visualization techniques is facilitating  the application of this functional lens to fundamental new insights in understanding the dynamics of human actions, especially the “wisdom of crowds.” In this symposium, we will bring together  noted biologists and computer scientists who work on the behavior of humans and animals and the connectedness of neurons and ecosystems to explore the power of social network analysis in solving problems in complex connected systems.