Title: Human Problem Solving Strategies on Complex Networks
Speaker: Sudarshan Iyengar, ISI, Chennai.
Date: 4:30 pm on Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Venue: Room 217, Mechanical Engineering
Abstract:
While a familiar proverb says - a friend in need is a friend indeed, the 'science of networks' has a lot more to add: "Friends of friends play a significant role in your life and are as important as your friends". This subject which goes by the name network science is a study of interacting entities, e.g., friendship networks, network of proteins, network of connected computers, information networks, terrorist networks; to name a few. A topic that was solely of interest to sociologists, has from the past 15 years permeated into several other branches of pure and applied science. The main reason for this being the advancement in information processing and information accumulation techniques in the recent years which has enabled one to garner 'big data'.
We will tour through an application of networks in understanding human problem solving techniques. We shall see, how a simple word game called the 'wordladders' invented by Lewis Carroll comes in as a facilitating framework to dissect and understand the human problem solving strategies. The talk will be self-contained and assumes nil pre-requisites.
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