WNCG Professor Sujay Sanghavi received a Young Investigator Award from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). Within the Department of Defense (DoD) and the U.S. Strategic Command, the DTRA leads the effort to combat the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Every year, DTRA makes about 15 Young Investigator Awards to researchers from various science and engineering fields; the purpose is primarily to support fundamental research. The award, which goes up to five years, recognizes and furthers Prof. Sanghavi's research on cascades in networks. Cascades are models for processes where the infection, compromising, and activation of one node (probabilistically) causes the same to happen to other nodes. They are models for failures in infrastructure and communication networks, opinions and ideas in social networks, popularity of online content and products, and epidemics in human society. Our understanding of cascades has lagged their exploding importance; this project aims to fill that gap. In particular, the aim is to marry techniques from machine learning, high-dimensional statistics, and network processes to better understand the effect of network graphs on node behavior, and vice versa.
