Herself’s Artificial Intelligence

Totally cool and totally scary. This algorithm finds hidden social networks no matter how small. This may turn out to be an excellent resource against terrorist networks. Currently the algorithm has and is being used to detect genetic networks. The algorithm was inspired by stegography but can be applied to any network of information.

Human diseases and social networks would seem to have little in common. However, at the crux of these two lies a network, communities within the network, and farther even, substructures of the communities. In a recent paper in Physical Review E 77:016104 (2008), Weixiong Zhang, Ph.D., Washington University associate professor of computer science and engineering and of genetics, and his Ph.D. student, Jianhua Ruan, published an algorithm, a recipe of computer instructions, to automatically discover communities and their subtle structures in various networks.

Many complex systems can be represented as networks, Zhang said, including the genetic networks he studies, social networks and the Internet. The community structure of networks features a natural division of the network where the vertices in each subnetwork are highly involved with each other, though connected less strongly with the rest of the network. Communities are relatively independent of one another structurally, but it is thought that each community may correspond to a fundamental functional unit. A community in a genetic network usually contains genes with similar functions, just as a community on the World Wide Web often corresponds to web pages on similar topics.

All Zhang and Ruan need are data. Their algorithm is more scalable than existing algorithms and can detect communities at a finer scale and with a higher accuracy than similar algorithms. The impact of having such a computational biology tool is in genomics, where researchers may be better able to identify and understand communities of genes and their networks as well as how they cooperate in causing diseases, such as sepsis, virus infections, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. [ read more Algorithm finds the network -- for genes or the internet ]

More information:
Jianhua Ruan’s Homepage
Weixiong Zhang’s Homepage ( links to several of his programs on homepage )
Nature paper describes technique for extracting hierarchical structure of networks

Papers:
In Search of the Biological Significance of Modular Structures in Protein Networks