Networks are ubiquitous, and often large. The WWW contains over a trillion pages. The Internet contains over 900 million hosts. Facebook has over 900 million active users. The human brain contains over 80 billion neurons. The world has over over 7 billion people.
The behaviour of such networks is determined not just by the behaviour of individual nodes, but also by the network topology. The famous six degrees of separation often hold, for example. Network dynamics and self-organization are also important.
From the nodes and links of these large networks, fascinating things emerge. Nobody expected what happened when a small internal network at CERN was scaled up to planetary size, for example. And somehow, the interactions of our billions of neurons make us intelligent.
The 5th International Workshop on Emergent Intelligence on Networked Agents (WEIN’13) will be exploring some of these phenomena at AAMAS in Saint Paul, Minnesota next May.
The WEIN 2013 Call for Papers is out, and submissions are due January 30. It is likely to be an interesting event, and one that should help to build bridges between the multi-agent system and complex network communities.
Bridging disciplines: the PLoS One Map of Science
– Tony
Posted by Tony 
Human Science Explored 