Event

Advanced Networks Colloquium: Walter Willinger, "Network Science and the Internet"

Friday, October 21, 2011
11:00 a.m.
1146 A.V. Williams Building
Kimberly Edwards
301 405 6579
kedwards@umd.edu

Advanced Networks Colloquium
Network Science and the Internet: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

Walter Willinger
AT&T Laboratories

Host
John Baras

| video |

Abstract
"Network Science" (also called the "Science of Complex Networks") is a new and 
very active area of scientific research inspired largely by the empirical study of 
real-world technological, social, and biological networks. Among the most 
celebrated achievements of this new field of science has been the discovery that 
the connectivity structure of many real-world networks is highly heterogeneous—most nodes have only a handful of connections, but there are a few nodes that have 
hundreds or thousands of neighbors. This finding has led to the development 
of appealingly simple new network models capable of making powerful predictions 
with minimal assumptions for systems such as the Internet, the power grid, and 
various biological and social networks. Unfortunately (or, fortunately?), many of these highly publicized predictions and 
claims quickly collapse when scrutinized with real data or examined by domain 
experts. Using the Internet as a prime example of a technological network, I will 
carefully trace and document the main sources of errors regarding the application 
of the current Network Science to real-world networks and show that many of the 
most popular complex network concepts are severely lacking in rigor. Fortunately, 
the Internet application also suggests an alternative approach, and I will illustrate 
the sort of paradigm shifts needed to develop a science of networks that is capable 
of accurately accounting for the highly engineered or highly evolved nature of many 
real-world networks.

Biography
Walter Willinger studied Mathematics at the ETH Zurich, Switzerland, and 
received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the School of ORIE, Cornell 
University, Ithaca, NY. For the last 15 years, he has worked at 
AT&T Labs - Research, the research arm of AT&T. Before that, he was a 
Member of Technical Staff at Bellcore Applied Research (1986-1996), the research consortium that was jointly own by the 7 Baby Bells. He is a 
Fellow of ACM (2005), IEEE (2005), AT&T (2007), and SIAM (2009), and for his work on the self-similar (“fractal”) nature of Internet traffic, he received the 
1996 IEEE W.R.G. Baker Prize Award from the IEEE Board of Directors, the 1994 W.R. Bennett Prize Paper Award from the IEEE Communications Society, 
and the 2006 “Test of Time” Paper Award from ACM SIGCOMM.

Audience: Graduate  Faculty  Staff  Post-Docs  Alumni