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Thursday, March 28
The Indiana Daily Student

Scientist lectures to Informatics Department

Maksim Kitsak pulled up a world map on a projector that displayed the amount of Facebook users per continent.

“We are all a part of a social system,” he said. “Or as most people like to call it, a social network.”

Kitsak, a mathematics lecturer and associate research scientist for the Department of Physics at Northeastern University, conducted a lecture Tuesday in the Informatics East building to discuss his area of work: latent geometry among technological, social and biological complex systems.

Kitsak said he is studying how to understand and identify different patterns and why things happen the ways they do.

“Complex systems are all around us,” he said. “The Internet, social networks and even trust among others. We have the basic knowledge to where we stand within complex systems, but we are limited in the knowledge to where complex systems connect to one another.”

Among the technological, social and biological real world networks in his research, Kitsak said there are common properties to each one: the Internet, trust and gene regulation.

“If you think of social networks, there are individuals who connect through them, each in different ways,” he said. “This can be geographically, by age, interests, appearance, education and more. There are also systems which live inside our organs, which are diseases that all share common genes.”

Kitsak said, however, it’s not that simple to categorize, because we don’t know why one attribute is more important than another.

This is where his study comes into play.

Kitsak described the theory of using a new geometric framework to regulate the prediction and control of the dynamics of these networks.

Kitsak said the networks in this framework are transferred through geometric spaces where network nodes are points in the spaces. The probability of a connection between any of the nodes is determined by the distance between them, and with a higher probability comes a higher chance of a connection.

IU informatics graduate student Krishna Bathina said the informatics department holds these lectures for a specific reason other than to educate.

“The lectures are basically job interviews for future professors,” he said. “The guest lecture speaks to nearly the entire department on what their specialty is and presents their work. It brings a lot of feedback between current professors and students. The department then may choose to employ them for the future.”

Bathina said he has attended most of these lectures because it will have an effect on his future. He is working toward a graduate degree.

“I’m going to be here for another five years, so I’m going to want to know who the department is bringing in to teach,” he said. “The lectures are a good way to spread ideas. The lecturers who come in are good in their specific areas and can shed light on something that hasn’t been touched on in the past.”

Kitsak said the primary goal within his work is to unite scientists working in multiple areas trying to develop a common language and approach across complex systems.

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