Earlier this month it was reported that the United States Office of Naval Research would be providing The University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science with $7.5 million grant to advance the field of Network Sciences.  A further investigation of “Network Sciences” reveals this definition, put forth in a 2005 study commission by the United States military and currently available through the National Academies Press:

“A working definition of network science is the study of network representations of physical, biological, and social phenomena leading to predictive models of these phenomena.”

The press release announcing the grant goes on toe describe network sciences in more absolute terms and provides some insight into the possible gains the U.S. military expects to get from this research.  It describes the possibilities of predicting behaviors, opinions, and actions as they propagate through social networks.  If one steps back for a minute, it is quite easy to see where the military hopes to go with a predictive model of this kind.

Imagine predicting who was most likely to join a terrorist organization based on links in a social network, or predicting the passage of terrorist and/or anti-us sentiment as it moves through certain regions.  It would also be very helpful for our defense department to identify strong and weak ties in an enemy organization, and to pick out structural weaknesses and holes in such a social graph.  It would be extraordinarily helpful for our government to harness the knowledge contained in a given networking site (Facebook or mySpace) and combine this knowledge with the information known about terrorist networks.

Network sciences has certainly been a topic of study in the past, but this is the first time the value of the field has been acknowledged and publicly sought out by the U.S. military.  The success of network science in predicting and modeling behavior has proved valuable in several other fields most notably marketing.  Unlike the marketing field where the group being studied is typically a representation of the intended audience, the biggest hurdle for the researchers at Penn will be “reverse engineer[ing] ‘local’ rules and protocols that produce global behaviors”

In an interesting “science fiction precedes science” moment, the Office of Naval Research is startlingly similar to Isaac Asimov’s concept of Psychohistory.  Which is described as the combination of “history, sociology, and mathematical statistics to make […] predictions of the collective actions of very large groups of people.”

This grant represents a milestone in Network Science moving forward as an important field of studies with a broad range of predictive possibilities in a variety of fields.

REFERENCES:

http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/04/pentagon-looks.htmlhttp://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11516

http://www.upenn.edu/pennnews/article.php?id=1363

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_%28fictional%29