Collective Behavior in Online Social Networks, Politicians, and Cows

Speaker: Mason Porter

Complex systems of interacting entities exhibit "emergent" dynamics in the form of collective behavior.  Such behavior, which can take many forms (e.g., flocking, herding, and opinion consensus), occurs in many real and model systems, even though they are not encoded in the microscopic rules of those systems.  In this talk, Porter will give an introduction to collective behavior, in both model-driven and data-driven studies, with a discussion of three examples: installing applications in online social networks, voting on bills by U.S. legislators, and synchronization of cows.

Mason Porter is a professor of mathematics at UCLA.