In this talk we will discuss ongoing research on modeling and analysis of social, economic and financial networks. The talk will focus on mathematical models for social networks that allow to study how networks are formed, the structured of social networks and communities, and how information is being disseminated. The analysis and results of the models can help to come up with more efficient algorithms for community detection, identifying influential nodes, and predicting the popularity of content/information that is being shared in the network. We will also discuss how these models can be applied to economic and financial networks.

Peter Marbach was born in Lucerne, Switzerland. He received the Eidg. Dipl. El.-Ing. (1993) from the ETH Zurich, Switzerland, the M.S. (1994) in electrical engineering from the Columbia University, NY, U.S.A, and the Ph.D. (1998) in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A. He is a professor at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Toronto. He has also been a visiting professor at Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK, at the Ecole Polytechnique Federal at Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, and at the Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris, France, and a post-doctoral fellow at Cambridge University, UK.

His research interests are in the fields of communication networks, in particular in the area of social networks, peer-to-peer networks and wireless networks.