Networks used to be comprehensible; you could understand their parts and how they worked together, and, because you did, they were controllable in a very basic, mechanical way. But utilization rates, numbers of nodes, and application types have increased every year, sometimes exponentially, always significantly, and the trend shows every sign of continuing until retirement. Networks are steadily becoming more chaotic and harder to control.

Everyone's first thought about the right way to fix this problem, says Fred Hapgood, is to retain today's general outlook and just automate it. However, some researchers have noticed that biology is rich with large networks — such as protein cascades and gene switching networks — and seems to have no trouble extracting wonderfully adaptive and robust behaviors out of all these systems. Take a couple of minutes to step away from your current hardware challenges and check out what scientists say may be coming next.

I have written about visualizations of various science things on this blog including yesterday. Here is a contest on the topic. The National Science Foundation (NSF) and the journal Science, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, invite you to participate in the fifth annual Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. The competition recognizes scientists, engineers, visualization specialists and artists for producing or commissioning innovative work in visual communication. The entry deadline is May 31.

Winners in each category will be published in the September 28, 2007 issue of Science and Science Online, and will be displayed on the NSF Web site.

Following up on my admiration for their Communication-Minded Visualization manifesto, Martin Wattenberg , Fernanda Viégas, and the rest of their compatriots at IBM's Visual Communication Lab have launched Many Eyes. Many Eyes is the concrete manifestation of the themes in their manifesto:

Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to "democratize" visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis.

Here is their description - InfoViz at PNNL:

PNNL has long been a world leader in visualization tools and research. Our many publications and the success of our software, such as IN-SPIRE™ and Starlight™, are the results of our dedication to helping people make sense of large volumes of data.

We have been deploying technologies for more than ten years in domains such as threat detection for national security, pharmaceutical development, energy grid security, environmental safety, training applications, and law enforcement. We are capitalizing on this experience to address the challenge of not only understanding the past and the present, but to gain insight into alternative potential futures.

Consider the local café. It serves as a hub of the social networks in the local community, a meeting place for individuals and groups, a social network from which the employees of the store are hired and to whom they build relationships over time.

Like many modern cafes around the world, the local café offers wifi access, as customers open up their laptops and go online they become multiple nodes on the global Internet Network. As they work, send email, chat with friends, upload and download digital content, they do so through the connection the café owner purchased and maintains.

The café serves a variety of locally produced baked goods from a number of local bakeries and serves coffee the owner roasts herself in the back of the café. These form two critical supply chains for the café, one a very local network of bakeries and their daily deliveries, and the other an international supply chain which the café owner is connected to through the regional distributor from whom she buys unroasted beans. Teas, milk, sugar, cups, and other consumables she purchases from yet other networks of suppliers and distributors.

When customers pay with cash their money is first placed into the café's cash register, then each night into the safe, and a few times each week the money is deposited into the café's accounts at a local branch of a business bank. When customers pay with a credit card, the card is swiped into a dedicated credit card terminal which then connects to the merchant bank the café works with to check that card for approval. When approved those charges are added to the accounts for the café and on a regular basis money net of fees is paid to the café for those transactions. In short the café is deeply tied to the financial networks for credit cards, banking, and other services. Likely, the café has an established line of credit which was used to set up the café and which may be used as part of the payment processes for the many suppliers the café depends upon.

When the café pays its employees it also sets aside funds for a variety of other parties, federal and state taxes, unemployment insurance, and since the café owner believes in a living wage and fair wages she also provides good if minimal health insurance for her employees. In her state, she also collects a variety of sales taxes on every transaction which she remits to the state on a regular basis.

Every Thursday, Friday and Saturday night the café hosts musicians. To market these performances and to build her customer base she advertises in the local independent newspapers. For many years she also paid for a yellow pages ad, though in more recent years she no longer does that, instead she buys some targeted ads on Google and trades with one of her regular customers for help in maintaining the café's website and presence on MySpace.com and other sites. In all of this promotional efforts she is part of a marketing network both on and offline where she is seeking to gain the attention of new customers, fans and musicians.

And on a prosaic, but important level, the café is plugged into the local power grid, reliant on the local telco for phone (and alarm) services, and reliant on the local transportation grid to ensure that customers can reach the café either in a car or via local public transit.

in short even a small, local café is deeply impacted by multiple interlocking and different networks. And as firms and organizations grow larger they will be impacted by still other and more networks.

MeshForum 2007 will focus on this intersection of networks - economic, technical, social and physical. We will bring together world renowned academic experts, creative artists, and business and government experts who each study and work with in one or more complex networks. Over three days you will learn many new approaches to visualizing and understanding networks and you will have many opportunities to work with your fellow attendees and colleagues.

Possible dates are May 15-17, May 21 or 22nd - 23rd or 24th, or over Memorial Day weekend (May 26-28) or May 29-31st. Since Sunbelt this year is in Greece at the beginning of May we are primarily considering the dates on or after May 21st.

In past years the format for MeshForum has been two full days of a single track of sessions followed by a full day in Open Space, with group lunches and dinners. When possible we have had an opening night reception the night before our first sessions.

For 2007 I am proposing the following alternative schedule. This schedule has 8-9 full session slots (~45 min presentations with 15-20 min of Q&A), 8 Interstitial slots (5-15 min presentations) and three lunch workshops, as well as 6 hours of open space in three 2 hour blocks. We would still have group breakfasts, lunches, opening reception and at least one group dinner, possibly two. After dinner we would try to provide space for further conversations.

The proposed schedule is:

Registration opens late afternoon at conference hotel/registration (if at a retreat center)
Opening night reception at 7pm w/wine, locally sourced cheeses and food

First Day:

8:30 AM - breakfast and registration open
9:00 AM - opening remarks by Shannon Clark
9:30 AM - opening keynote presentation (1 hr)
10:30 AM - morning break
10:45 AM - First Interstitial
11:00 AM - second full session
Noon - First lunch workshop
1:30 PM - First Open Space
3:30 PM - Second Interstitial
3:45 PM - Afternoon Break
4:00 PM - Third full session
5:00 PM - Third Interstitial
5:30 PM - break/transit to group dinner
6:00 PM - group dinner followed by open conversations

Second Day:

8:30 AM - Breakfast
9:00 AM - Fourth Full session
10:00 AM - Fourth Interstitial
10:15 AM - Morning Break
10:30 AM- Fifth Full session
11:30 AM - Fifth Interstitial
Noon - Second Lunch workshop
1:30 PM - Second Open Space session (2 hours)
3:30 PM - Sixth Interstitial
3:45 PM - Afternoon break
4:00 PM - Sixth Full Session
5:30 PM - break for group dinner
6:00 PM - group dinner followed by open conversations

Third Day

8:30 AM - Breakfast
9:00 AM - Seventh Interstitial
9:30 AM - Seventh Full session
10:30 AM - Morning Break
10:45 AM - Eighth Interstitial
11:00 AM - Eighth Full Session
Noon - Third lunch workshop
1:30 PM - Third Open Space workshop - focused on our follow up actions
3:30 PM - Closing remarks
4:00 PM - MeshForum 2007 ends

Eytan Adar (veteran social media grapher) pointed me to this paper (Lehmann and Kottler) on graph layout which contains an interesting example in the form of LiveJournal data.

In the light of the ongoing complications around AOL's release of search data for researchers, a major aspect of MeshForum's service offering to sponsoring organizations and companies will be to work closely with the source of each data set to ensure that no personal data or propriatary information is released as part of the data collections, while also working to ensure that any necessary modifications to the data do not impact the network analysis of the data collection. In many cases this may mean that certain collections of data can not be released, or can only be released in forms suitable for some types of analysis (aggregate but not specific individuals for example).

MeshForum will seek to make these data collections as widely available as possible and will be working with all organizations and tools vendors to help define interoperable standards for the exchange of network data collections. We will work with other data repositories and research organizations. Our mission is to work in an open and interdisciplinary manner, so we will be seeking data collections from a very wide spectrum of types of networks - biological systems, transportation networks, supply chains, economic/business transactional records, data sets derived from social art projects, social network data collections and many more.

Data sets may also be of any size, though we will actively seek large, "real-world" scale data collections to make the largest and richest collections of network data available for research.

We will be exploring a variety of funding mechanisms for these data collections and related services. Our intent will be to balance the desire to make these data collections as widely available as possible, while covering the costs of collecting, storing, preserving, sharing and wherever possible updating these data collections. We will ask corporate providers of data to help cover many of the costs associated with their datasets. We will seek to make this data available both to academic institutions and corporate (or government) researchers equally.

If you are interested in working with MeshForum to make one or more collections of data available please contact us either via the contact us page on our website, via leaving a comment here, or by calling MeshForum at 1.800.454.4929.

If you are interested in researching networks and would be interested in any data sets we collect (or have specific types of data sets you would be interested in working with) please also contact us. We will add you to a mailing list for ongoing discussions, as well as to receive notifications as new data sets become available.

If you are a firm offering applications for studying or visualizing network data we are very interested in working closely with you to ensure that any data sets we collect that would be relevent to your users are made available in a format easily useable by your applications, either directly or through well documented (and ideally open source) translators.

Ever since 1969, when psychologists Jeffery Travers and Stanley Milgram first explained that everyone was separated by only six connections from anyone else, researchers have created theoretical models of the networks that societies create. Now, computer scientists at the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science have devised an ingenious experiment to put such theories to the test.

The findings, which appear today in the journal Science, have implications for many forms of social interaction, from disaster management to how many friends connect to your MySpace page. The Penn researchers have found that some of the simplest social networks function the most poorly and that information beyond a local view of the network can actually hinder the ability of some complicated social networks to accomplish tasks.

[linked by Emily Turrettini at Smart Mobs]

Imagine that you could represent an organization as a dynamic organism, with individuals being nodes in a network, with the links between individuals representing the interactions, the transactions, the exchanges through which work actually gets done.

Researchers at The Accenture Institute for High Performance Business are developing just such a tool. The technology makes it possible to see informal organizational networks and observe the channels through which work actually gets done ... in real time.

How can leaders benefit from the ability to monitor change? This comprehensive seven-minute presentation provides a demonstration, overview and example of The Accenture Visualizing Organizations Initiative.

[found via Bruce Hoppe at Connectedness.]