Pentagon Looks to Network Science to Predict Future

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By Sharon Weinberger

The University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science just announced that it’s been awarded a $7.5 million grant to work in this fast emerging field of network science, which melds everything from mathematics to sociology.

Network science is increasingly the "hot" area for Pentagon research. Why? Because the Pentagon hopes that if it can understand complex networks, then it can understand terrorist networks, and even predict who will join such a network.

What exactly is network science? According a 2005 study done for the Army:

A working definition of network science is the study of network representations of physical, biological, and social phenomena leading to predictive models of these phenomena. Initiation of a field of network science would be appropriate to provide a body of rigorous results that would improve the predictability of the engineering design of complex networks and also speed up basic research in a variety of applications areas

Prediction is a tricky thing, something that researchers involved in the field readily acknowledge:

“Network science is something that is still in its infancy,” Michael Kearns, professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science at Penn, said. “But the idea is to use the mathematical knowledge of graph theory and other discrete objects, as well as domain-specific, to understand, predict and design the behavior of networks.”

The 2005 study is worth the read, if only because it discusses the difference between network centric warfare, which focused on information technology, and this new field of network science, which looks at human networks. These are very much related to the issues Noah discussed in his Iraq article last year.

Actually, the emergence of "network science" may prove that prediction does work in at least one key regard. Isaac Asimov came up with the fictional idea of "psychohistory," which combined history, sociology and mathematics to predict the actions of large groups. It seems he wasn’t far off.