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Meeting history
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March 1 to April 15
2008
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| [ Collective
Dynamics in Information Systems (CDInfos0803) ] |
In the last years there has been great interest in applications
of statistical physics to information systems, as witnessed by no
less than four satellite meetings to the Statphys 23 congress (July
2007). The emergent, collective aspects that are of interest here
range from the traffic on the Internet or in Peer-to-Peer networks,
to the structure and solution of hard optimization problems to
analogies in bioinformatics.
Work by physicists in this novel field has lead to some recent
advances such as the "Survey Propagation" algorithm for hard
NP-complete optimization problems, and its fundamental
understanding via the cavity method of spin glasses. A related
example is the "Belief Propagation" method and its applications to
decoding, which have been elucidated by statistical mechanics
techniques and analogues.
The Internet itself is an example of a disordered, scale-free graph
and the spreading of epidemics in such conditions was first shown
by statistical physicists to be fundamentally different from the
usual paradigm since in many cases the spreading threshold
vanishes. The control and self-generated collective dynamics of
many interacting agents or markets is becoming ever more topical
due to the proliferation of Peer-to-Peer technologies.
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July 15 to 18
2007
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| [ Statistical
mechanics of distributed information systems ] |
Statistical physics has recently applied been to understanding,
analysis and design of large distributed information systems. These
range from decoding algorithms (Belief Propagation) and phase
transitions and typical-case hardness in combinatorial optimization
problems to content distribution and dynamical phenomena on the
Internet, to the modelling of distributed agent systems -
Peer-to-Peer networks, auction mechanisms and so forth. The meeting
aims to survey current trends in this exciting area, and foster new
research into untapped directions.
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