195 research outputs found
A new four-point probe design to measure conductivity in polymeric thin films
In the development of new conducting polymers applications,the conductivity measurement is still a challenge, specially for extremely thin samples as the ones obtained by CVD. This study shows the design of a novel four-point probe for conductivity characterization of polypirrole thin films synthesized by plasma enhanced polymerization.The system possesses the minimal distance possible among electrodes, together with a high ratio of electrode length to spacing to enhance the electrical response. The four-point probe has been fabricated in a printed circuit board, which offers some advantages such as non-damaging samples, low cost or repeatability in the analysis measurements
Immunization of networks with community structure
In this study, an efficient method to immunize modular networks (i.e.,
networks with community structure) is proposed. The immunization of networks
aims at fragmenting networks into small parts with a small number of removed
nodes. Its applications include prevention of epidemic spreading, intentional
attacks on networks, and conservation of ecosystems. Although preferential
immunization of hubs is efficient, good immunization strategies for modular
networks have not been established. On the basis of an immunization strategy
based on the eigenvector centrality, we develop an analytical framework for
immunizing modular networks. To this end, we quantify the contribution of each
node to the connectivity in a coarse-grained network among modules. We verify
the effectiveness of the proposed method by applying it to model and real
networks with modular structure.Comment: 3 figures, 1 tabl
Size reduction of complex networks preserving modularity
The ubiquity of modular structure in real-world complex networks is being the
focus of attention in many trials to understand the interplay between network
topology and functionality. The best approaches to the identification of
modular structure are based on the optimization of a quality function known as
modularity. However this optimization is a hard task provided that the
computational complexity of the problem is in the NP-hard class. Here we
propose an exact method for reducing the size of weighted (directed and
undirected) complex networks while maintaining invariant its modularity. This
size reduction allows the heuristic algorithms that optimize modularity for a
better exploration of the modularity landscape. We compare the modularity
obtained in several real complex-networks by using the Extremal Optimization
algorithm, before and after the size reduction, showing the improvement
obtained. We speculate that the proposed analytical size reduction could be
extended to an exact coarse graining of the network in the scope of real-space
renormalization.Comment: 14 pages, 2 figure
Comparing community structure identification
We compare recent approaches to community structure identification in terms
of sensitivity and computational cost. The recently proposed modularity measure
is revisited and the performance of the methods as applied to ad hoc networks
with known community structure, is compared. We find that the most accurate
methods tend to be more computationally expensive, and that both aspects need
to be considered when choosing a method for practical purposes. The work is
intended as an introduction as well as a proposal for a standard benchmark test
of community detection methods.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, 1 table. v2: condensed, updated version as
appears in JSTA
New approaches to model and study social networks
We describe and develop three recent novelties in network research which are
particularly useful for studying social systems. The first one concerns the
discovery of some basic dynamical laws that enable the emergence of the
fundamental features observed in social networks, namely the nontrivial
clustering properties, the existence of positive degree correlations and the
subdivision into communities. To reproduce all these features we describe a
simple model of mobile colliding agents, whose collisions define the
connections between the agents which are the nodes in the underlying network,
and develop some analytical considerations. The second point addresses the
particular feature of clustering and its relationship with global network
measures, namely with the distribution of the size of cycles in the network.
Since in social bipartite networks it is not possible to measure the clustering
from standard procedures, we propose an alternative clustering coefficient that
can be used to extract an improved normalized cycle distribution in any
network. Finally, the third point addresses dynamical processes occurring on
networks, namely when studying the propagation of information in them. In
particular, we focus on the particular features of gossip propagation which
impose some restrictions in the propagation rules. To this end we introduce a
quantity, the spread factor, which measures the average maximal fraction of
nearest neighbors which get in contact with the gossip, and find the striking
result that there is an optimal non-trivial number of friends for which the
spread factor is minimized, decreasing the danger of being gossiped.Comment: 16 Pages, 9 figure
Analytical solution of a model for complex food webs
We investigate numerically and analytically a recently proposed model for
food webs [Nature {\bf 404}, 180 (2000)] in the limit of large web sizes and
sparse interaction matrices. We obtain analytical expressions for several
quantities with ecological interest, in particular the probability
distributions for the number of prey and the number of predators. We find that
these distributions have fast-decaying exponential and Gaussian tails,
respectively. We also find that our analytical expressions are robust to
changes in the details of the model.Comment: 4 pages (RevTeX). Final versio
A measure of individual role in collective dynamics
Identifying key players in collective dynamics remains a challenge in several
research fields, from the efficient dissemination of ideas to drug target
discovery in biomedical problems. The difficulty lies at several levels: how to
single out the role of individual elements in such intermingled systems, or
which is the best way to quantify their importance. Centrality measures
describe a node's importance by its position in a network. The key issue
obviated is that the contribution of a node to the collective behavior is not
uniquely determined by the structure of the system but it is a result of the
interplay between dynamics and network structure. We show that dynamical
influence measures explicitly how strongly a node's dynamical state affects
collective behavior. For critical spreading, dynamical influence targets nodes
according to their spreading capabilities. For diffusive processes it
quantifies how efficiently real systems may be controlled by manipulating a
single node.Comment: accepted for publication in Scientific Report
Network-based models for social recommender systems
With the overwhelming online products available in recent years, there is an
increasing need to filter and deliver relevant personalized advice for users.
Recommender systems solve this problem by modeling and predicting individual
preferences for a great variety of items such as movies, books or research
articles. In this chapter, we explore rigorous network-based models that
outperform leading approaches for recommendation. The network models we
consider are based on the explicit assumption that there are groups of
individuals and of items, and that the preferences of an individual for an item
are determined only by their group memberships. The accurate prediction of
individual user preferences over items can be accomplished by different
methodologies, such as Monte Carlo sampling or Expectation-Maximization
methods, the latter resulting in a scalable algorithm which is suitable for
large datasets
Universality in Bacterial Colonies
The emergent spatial patterns generated by growing bacterial colonies have
been the focus of intense study in physics during the last twenty years. Both
experimental and theoretical investigations have made possible a clear
qualitative picture of the different structures that such colonies can exhibit,
depending on the medium on which they are growing. However, there are
relatively few quantitative descriptions of these patterns. In this paper, we
use a mechanistically detailed simulation framework to measure the scaling
exponents associated with the advancing fronts of bacterial colonies on hard
agar substrata, aiming to discern the universality class to which the system
belongs. We show that the universal behavior exhibited by the colonies can be
much richer than previously reported, and we propose the possibility of up to
four different sub-phases within the medium-to-high nutrient concentration
regime. We hypothesize that the quenched disorder that characterizes one of
these sub-phases is an emergent property of the growth and division of bacteria
competing for limited space and nutrients.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figure
The effects of spatial constraints on the evolution of weighted complex networks
Motivated by the empirical analysis of the air transportation system, we
define a network model that includes geographical attributes along with
topological and weight (traffic) properties. The introduction of geographical
attributes is made by constraining the network in real space. Interestingly,
the inclusion of geometrical features induces non-trivial correlations between
the weights, the connectivity pattern and the actual spatial distances of
vertices. The model also recovers the emergence of anomalous fluctuations in
the betweenness-degree correlation function as first observed by Guimer\`a and
Amaral [Eur. Phys. J. B {\bf 38}, 381 (2004)]. The presented results suggest
that the interplay between weight dynamics and spatial constraints is a key
ingredient in order to understand the formation of real-world weighted
networks
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