The Warren Center for Network and Data Sciences at Penn

I'm in Philadelphia today, to speak at the inauguration of Penn's new Warren Center for Network and Data Sciences. The directors are Michael Kearns and Ricky Vohra, and they have a multi-disciplinary group of Penn faculty lined up to participate.

Here's the announcement: New Network and Data Sciences Center to Open at Penn

And here's the prospective account of the talk I should try to give...

In addition to Kearns and Vohra, the launch event will feature talks by Eduardo Glandt, the Nemirovsky Family Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and by Alvin E. Roth of Stanford University, who shared in the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.

Roth’s Nobel-winning work was on a theory for finding mutually beneficial matches between nodes in complex networks. The theory’s applications include the process medical students use to apply for residencies, as well as a program for finding compatible donors and recipients for kidney transplants.    

“We’re planning on funding research projects that, in addition to being scientifically stellar, have some chance of doing social good,” Kearns said. “That’s one of the reasons Roth’s talk is perfect for this launch: network science can show which kidney is compatible with each recipient, and it needs to draw on algorithms, networks and big data sets, but, at the end of the day, this was a research project that saved people’s lives.”