Networked Life: Module CIS 112, University of Pennsylvania, Spring 2008

What kind of science is appropriate for understanding the Facebook? How does Google find what you're looking for... ...and exactly how do they make money doing so? What structural properties might we expect any social network to have? How does your position in an economic network (dis)advantage you? How are individual and collective behavior related in complex networks? What might we mean by the economics of spam? What do game theory and the Paris subway have to do with Internet routing? What's going on in the pictures to the left and right? Networked Life looks at how our world is connected -- socially, economically, strategically and technologically -- and why it matters. The answers to the questions above are related. They have been the subject of a fascinating intersection of disciplines including computer science, physics, psychology, mathematics, economics and finance. Researchers from these areas all strive to quantify and explain the growing complexity and connectivity of the world around us, and they have begun to develop a rich new science along the way. Networked Life will explore recent scientific efforts to explain social, economic and technological structures -- and the way these structures interact -- on many different scales, from the behavior of individuals or small groups to that of complex networks such as the Internet and the global economy. This course covers computer science topics and other material that is mathematical, but all material will be presented in a way that is accessible to an educated audience with or without a strong technical background. The course is open to all majors and all levels, and is taught accordingly. There will be ample opportunities for those of a quantitative bent to dig deeper into the topics we examine. The majority of the course is grounded in scientific and mathematical findings of the past two decades or less.