access_time 02 de julho de 2019 às 14:30 até 02 de julho de 2019 às 16:30
place Sala 4.41, 2.º Piso do Pavilhão de Civil, IST, Alameda
If we observe our daily lives and the systems in which we participate carefully, it is easy to see that everything is somehow connected. From species evolution to social relations, passing through all the supply chain systems we know, networks portray the simplest representation of these systems. Notwithstanding this simplicity, these networks often underlie complex dynamics. Species and populations evolution are subject to many complex interactions, and individuals states -- from individual choices, epidemic states, strategic behaviors, opinions, among others -- are influenced by social ties and by the overall topology of interaction. These networks, called complex networks, show a prevalence of certain features, which are shared between completely different systems, thus defying the limits of the traditional techniques of analysis and intriguing the research community. In this thesis we aim to contribute to the study of the relationship between structure and dynamics of these complex networks. Usually, the main approach to study complex networks is centered on the importance of nodes. However, it is our understanding that the edge-perspective analysis also provides fundamental and complementary information on the structure and behavior of complex networks. Given this, throughout this dissertation we approach complex networks under an edge perspective, centering our attention in the properties of the edges. In our contributions we provide new metrics, models and computational tools. We start by contributing with a new edge centrality measure. Next, we focus on analyzing local patterns/subgraphs whose edges contain informative labels, highlighting that sometimes observing only nodes and edges, individually, is not enough to fully understand the dynamics and/or the structure of a system. Finally, we observe that often representing a system with a single network is insufficient to reproduce its behavior, being necessary to consider networks at multiple scales, i.e. networks of networks. Our contribution in this subject is a new computational tool that allows us to model and simulate a system represented as a network of networks.
local_offer Prova de Doutoramento
person Candidato: Andreia Sofia Monteiro Teixeira
supervisor_account Orientador: Prof. Alexandre Paulo Lourenço Francisco / Prof. Francisco João Duarte Cordeiro