Petter Holme
Petter Holme (Tokyo Institute of Technology)
Petter Holme is a specially appointed professor of the Institute of Innovative Research at Tokyo Institute of Technology. His research interest is to bridge data science and theory in the study of social systems. He often starts his research in collaboration with social and medical scientists on large data sets, then he develops methods and perform simulation studies as spin-off projects to the data science ones. Recently his interests have focused on temporal networks—networks where the timing of contacts are known, in addition to who interacts with whom. Before joining Tokyo Tech, Holme was a Professor at Sungkyunkwan University, Korea, and associate professor at Umeå University, Sweden.
Temporal networks of human interaction
The power of any kind of network approach lies in the ability to simplify a complex system so that one can better understand its function as a whole. Sometimes it is beneficial, however, to include more information than in a simple graph of only nodes and links. Adding information about times of interactions—modeling your system as temporal networks—can make predictions and mechanistic understanding more accurate. Just as there can be network structures affecting disease spreading, temporal structures can also govern the spreading dynamics. We will discuss recent developments in the analysis of temporal networks, including community detection, the definition of time scales, random walks and various forms of spreading processes. We argue that adding time to network representations fundamentally changes our usual network concepts—so much that it is perhaps meaningless to think of temporal networks as an extension of the network paradigm.