Special CSE Seminar

Speaker: Blair Sullivan, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)

Title:Enabling scalable real-world network analysis via structural graph theory

 Abstract:

 Network science is a rapidly growing interdisciplinary field with methods and applications drawn from across the natural, social, and information sciences. Perhaps surprisingly, very few approaches use techniques from the rich literature of structural graph theory. In this talk, we discuss some first steps towards integrating what have been predominantly theoretical results into tools for scalable network analysis.

Tree-like structures arise extensively in network science - for example, hierarchical structures in biology, hyperbolic routing in the internet, and core-periphery behavior in social networks. As such, this talk explores ways to use tree decompositions (key combinatorial objects from graph minor theory) in tandem with k-cores and Gromov hyperbolicity to provide structural characterization of and improve inference on complex networks. We also discuss new algorithms using tree decompositions to enable scalable solution of certain graph optimization problems in a high performance computing environment. 

Bio:

Blair D. Sullivan is a Research Staff Member in the Complex Systems Group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Her current research interests include graph algorithms, parallel computing, applied structural graph theory, and graph embeddings for quantum computing.

Before joining ORNL, Blair was a visiting researcher at the Renyi Institute in Budapest, Hungary. She received her Ph.D. in Mathematics at Princeton University as a Department of Homeland Security Graduate Fellow, and bachelor's degrees in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science at Georgia Tech. Blair has been the Principal Investigator on grants from the DOE's Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research, ORNL's LDRD program, and leads a team researching social network analysis for the DARPA GRAPHS program. She serves on the

Graph500 Steering Committee and the organizing committee for the SIAM Workshop on Combinatorial Scientific Computing (CSC13).