Documentary on Complex Networks

I finally made time to watch the ABC documentary on complex networks entitled "How Kevin Bacon Cured Cancer" after being promoted on the science show and edge.

The focus of this popular science piece is on small world networks and a brief on the scientists that launched the field of network theory. The evolution of the field is told to the story of an experiment to recreate the classical six degrees of separation experiment.

The documentary wasn't a bad way to spend a lunch break, although their experiment appeared to produce poor results where only 3 of the 40 initial letters made it to their destination ("three chains" with an average of six steps). It also felt like the editors had explicitly trimmed scientific terminology, even the word scientist. Whatever. I noted the core players in the narrative, as follows:

• Steven Strogatz: initially interested in the system dynamics of human relationships
• Duncan Watts: (Australian), student of Steven, addressing the issue of synchronicity (population of unique individuals cooperating). With Steven studied and described small world networks (very clustered, few random links), examples included Hollywood actor graph, US power grid, neuron connectivity in the brain, seminal paper
• Albert-László Barabási: added a important missing piece regarding the structure of the networks - the notion of connection hubs, concerned with scale free networks, devised classical equation to describe these networks (power law relationship of edges, for example), examined the web
• Alessandro Vespignani: interested in diffusion, focused on the use of such networks to transport things, spread of disease (like AIDS), target hubs to combat the spread of disease (for example), application of such work was claimed to be useful for locating terrorists on social networks
• Marc Vidal: the recipient in the small world experiment in the documentary, interested in mapping the network of protein interactions with the cell, mapping networks of the genes involved in disease
  

I remember reading into the field of complex networks (small world and scale free in particular) in 2005 because I had a colleague who was investigating such structured in evolutionary algorithms. I ended up hacking together variations on the self organizing map as an adaptive coverage model using small world structures - the work didn't go anywhere.

The best paper I cam remember from that time for jump-starting an understanding of the field (handed to me by my colleague) was Mark Newman's 2003 review article "The structure and function of complex networks".