Motivation
The coexistence of multiple types of interactions within social, technological and biological networks has moved the focus of the statistical physics of complex systems towards their description as a set of subsystems organized as layers of connectivity. This novel approach has unveiled that the multilayer nature of complex systems has strong influence in the emergence of collective states and their critical properties. Although recently spurred by the burst of datasets in which different means of interactions within the same system are encoded, the interest in the multilayered nature of complex systems dates back several decades and span across diverse disciplines. This has enhanced the activity devoted to multilayered networks of many network science practitioners during the recent years and, nowadays, the topic is one the most important directions in the field. A necessary step to improve our understanding of multilayer complex systems is to generalize models and tools of traditional network theory and to develop a unified framework covering all the possible types of interdependence between network layers. A natural description of multilayered systems consists in a population of nodes having different sets of neighbors in each layer (which can represent, e.g., a task, an activity, or a category). A fundamental aspect controlling the collective behavior of multilayer networks is how the interaction between the different types of connections is set. In particular, this type of (interlayer) interactions are intrinsic of multilayer networks, and it has been shown to be responsible for the emergence of novel collective phenomena due to the new structural and dynamical correlations between the components of a system that they introduce.
Scope of the satellite meeting
The scope of the satellite meeting is to review the recent advances in the field of multilayer and interconnected networks, focusing in particular on the interplay between structure and dynamics. We will pay special attention to novel applications in which the multilayer formulation is crucial. The list of topics that we aim to cover at the conference is the following:
- Mathematical properties of multilayer and interconnected structures
- Empirical measurements of multilayer and interconnected networks
- Applications of such models to biological, social and urban systems
Main Conference
2017 Conference on Complex Systems
Cancun, Mexico
Sep 17 - 22