research lines

Biological Networks

M. Ángeles Serrano

We study networks of molecular interactions in the cell. In the log term, we aim at producing a whole-cell functional network integrating signalling, genome, epigenome, proteome, and metabolism to mimic observed phenotypes and to predict cellular responses. We are also interested in brain networks, more specifically in understanding how spatial (...)

Citizen Science for Computational Social Science

Josep Perelló

Under the name of Citizen Science, many innovative practices in which volunteers partner with scientist to pose and answer real-world questions are quickly growing worldwide. Citizen Science can furnish ready made solutions with the active role of citizens. We particularly bridge Computational Social Sciences with Citizen Science philosophy, which in our case takes the (...)

Economic Networks

M. Ángeles Serrano

International trade moves annually trillions of dollars and represents one of the main networks of interactions between countries in the world. Along economic size, geographic distance has been recognized to shape trade interactions but its importance is currently under scrutiny. The gravity theory of trade flows is directly related with (...)

Epidemic spreading

Marián Boguñá and M. Ángeles Serrano

Networks are often the substrate over which spreading processes take place. Our research in this area is mainly focused on the understanding of the interplay between the network structure and spreading dynamics.

Foundations of complex networks

M. Ángeles Serrano and Marián Boguñá

A wide class of real systems of many interacting elements can be mapped into graphs or networks. Under this approach, vertices or nodes of the network represent the elements of the system whereas edges or links among them stand for interactions between different elements. This mapping has triggered a huge (...)

Human behavior and decision making

Josep Perelló

We investigate the behaviour of each individual in relation to his own benefit and the collective benefit. We use the infrastructure of the Board Games Festival DAU Barcelona to empirically find answers about humans’ behaviour through games and social dilemmas. We develop and design on digital platforms collective experiments to (...)

Human mobility

Albert Diaz-Guilera

The increased pervasiveness of information and communication technologies is enabling the tracking of human mobility at an unprecedented scale. Massive call detail records from mobile phone activities and the use of global positioning systems (GPS) in large vehicle fleets for instance, are generating extraordinary quantities of positional and movement data (...)

Multiplex networks

Albert Diaz-Guilera

The Science of Complex Systems is an emergent discipline rather successful in the last years. However, further progress in the physics is hampered by the lack of deep knowledge about how multi-level complex systems organize and operate. Preliminary results show that interactions at different levels behave in a significantly different (...)

Network Geometry

M. Ángeles Serrano and Marián Boguñá

Geometry appears as the most plausible explanation of the complex architecture we observe in real networks. Scale-free degree distributions, clustering, small-world property, communities, reciprocity and many more topological properties can be explained by the existence of a metric space controlling the network interactions.

Networks in cosmology

Marián Boguñá

The causal structure of spacetime and standard cosmological models can be easily mapped into hyperbolic geometry. Quite interestingly, networks that arise in this context are extremely similar to networks we find in domains as diverse as cell biology, social sciences, or socio-technological systems, like the Internet or the world wide (...)

Production and Distribution of Food during the Roman Empire

Albert Diaz-Guilera

We are currently collaborating with historians, archaeologists, and computer scientists to set up an innovative framework to investigate the political and economic mechanisms that characterized the dynamics of the commercial trade system during the Roman Empire. It is a project funded by the European Research Council and our contribution is (...)

Sinchronization in complex networks

Albert Díaz-Guilera

Complexity is usually understood as the emergence of nontrivial collective behaviors from the dynamical evolution of simple units that are interconnected. Synchronization corresponds to a global behavior of a population of individual oscillators. We have basically analyzed the influence of the topological features of complex networks in the dynamical properties (...)

Stochastic dynamics and extreme time events for socio-economic systems

Josep Perelló

The use of time series analysis and stochastic process modeling in complex systems studies has a long tradition, going back to to the application of Brownian (Gaussian) motion modeling to prices in the Paris stock market by Bachelier in 1900. 

These models and the statistics behind are best documented in the study (...)

Socio-technologic systems

Marián Boguñá

In the age of Information Technology, the Internet has become our primary communication system. It is estimated that more than a billion users surf every day the web looking for information, sharing files, or developing new applications. The physical Internet is like a new world where all kind of new (...)

Statistical mechanics of non-binary networks

Conrad J. Pérez-Vicente

Statistical properties of binary complex networks are well understood and recently many attempts have been made to extend this knowledge to weighted ones. There are, however, subtle yet important considerations to be made regarding the nature of the weights used in this generalization.

Weights can be either continuous or discrete magnitudes, (...)