Time-varying interaction networks, from flocks to random ones

Francesco Ginelli (University of Aberdeen)

In many biological, social and engineered systems, the activity of the individual agents generates time-varying interaction networks. Examples range from animal groups dynamics and time-dependent plasticity in neural networks to robot swarms, human social networks and communication networks of moving units.
The interplay between the temporal variation in the networks' connectivity patterns and the ongoing dynamic processes (both local and global) may induce non-trivial emergent properties which may not be captured by a static network analysis even in the limit of slow connectivity changes.
In this talk, I will discuss a few significative examples of these phenomena, ranging from flocking dynamics to randomly rewiring Erdös-Rény networks which may be seen as a crude model for social interactions.