Dr. Mark Newman is very famous in social network analysis. He has published and edited a lot of influential books and papers in this area, which can be found here. His research field is statistical physics theory, and his research focus on networks, spin systems and percolation, Monte Carlo methods. I cannot say he is the pioneer of social networks, but he is the pioneer during the recent great development of social networks, especially in the community structure discovery direction.
He got his B.A. in
Dr. Newman studies the structure and function of networks, including social and biological networks and computer networks like scientific coauthorship networks, citation networks, email networks, friendship networks, epidemiological contact networks, and animal social networks. He employs a combination of empirical methods, analysis, and computer simulation during the research work. And his research of social networks focuses on several directions as follows:
(1) He studies some fundamental network attributes, such as degree distributions, centrality measures, assortative mixing, vertex similarity.
(2) His work of social networks is the most famous known for the study of community structure. He proposed Girvan-Newman algorithm in 2002, which is one of the most important and classic algorithm in community detection. His research in this area involves how contact networks form and how structures affect the diffusion of information. Also, he has carried out empirical work on the collaboration networks, and developed computer simulations of the growth and formation of networks.
(3) Recently, he works on models of information propagation like disease propagation, friendship formation and spread of computer viruses over email networks.
(4) His other recent projects include navigation in networks and the Internet, mixing patterns within networks, network correlations and phase transitions in network structure.
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