SSIE 641 — Advanced Topics in Network Science
“Don’t think! Feeeeel.” — Bruce Lee, Enter the Dragon. That is the method here, and it is meant literally.
Every module starts with something you do with your own hands, before anything is defined. You trace the seven bridges of Königsberg on a map and fail, again, to cross each one exactly once. You count how many of your own friends know each other. You cut cables out of a power grid, one at a time, until the towns go dark. The definition arrives afterwards, as a name for something you have already felt.
No prior network science is assumed. The main text asks no linear algebra of you; the derivations sit on each module’s appendix page, to take or to leave. Code is folded shut until you click it.
Outside class you hand in two things: a Pair Notebook — a module taught as a one-on-one session with an AI tutor in your terminal, where the conversation is what gets graded, not the code — and a Group Mini-Project built with up to two teammates. Activities and grading lists everything that counts.
The nine modules
One question opens the course, and each of the nine modules asks another. The course begins with Why Networks? — why we need a science of networks instead of ordinary statistics — and there is nothing to hand in for it.
After that, every module carries its own set of materials, and not every module carries all of them. This is the table to come back to when you are not sure which thing you are supposed to be doing this week.
| Module | Pen & paper | Solutions | Mini-project | Pair Notebook | Lab notebook | Quiz |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| M01Euler Tour Can you walk a city crossing each bridge exactly once — and how would you ever prove you cannot? |
Seven Highways | solutions | ✓ + 3-min talk | — | m01lab | quiz01 |
| M02Small World Why is a stranger on the other side of the world only about six handshakes away? |
Six Handshakes to a Stranger | solutions | ✓ | ✓ | m02lab | ✓ |
| M03Robustness How much of a network can you destroy before it falls apart — and does it matter whether the damage is random or deliberate? |
Build it, Break it, and Build it Back in revision | — | ✓ | ✓ | — | ✓ |
| M04Friendship Paradox Why do your friends have more friends than you do? |
Reading Heavy Tails in revision | — | ✓ | ✓ | — | ✓ |
| M05Clustering What is a community in a network, and how would you know if the one you found is real? |
Discovering Friend Groups in revision | — | ✓ | ✓ | — | ✓ |
| M06Centrality Which node is the most important — and important in what sense? |
Who’s the Big Cheese in the University Clubs? in revision | — | ✓ | ✓ | — | ✓ |
| M07Random Walks What does a network look like to a walker who has no idea where they are going? |
Where Does the Drunkard Sleep? in revision | — | — | — | — | ✓ |
| M08Embedding How do you turn a network into coordinates without throwing away what makes it a network? |
From Matrix to Map in revision | — | — | — | — | ✓ |
| M09Graph Neural Networks An image filter slides over every pixel in the same way. What do you slide over a network, where no two nodes have the same neighborhood? |
Convolution and the Weisfeiler-Lehman Test in revision | — | — | — | — | ✓ |
Pen & paper and the lab notebook are what you work with in class: a printed sheet you fill in with a pencil, and the marimo notebook it hands off to at the end, opened from the QR code on the sheet. Neither is submitted — the lecture is built out of what the room found, and the quiz assumes you were there. Solutions are worked answers, for reading afterwards. Mini-project and Pair Notebook are the two graded assignments, both handed out through Classroom 50; the column headings link to what each one is. Quiz opens the following week’s class; where the cell is a link, it is the box you upload a photo of your answers into. A dash means that module does not have one, not that it is missing.
The sheets for M02–M09 are being rewritten and are not published yet; they are handed out in class in the meantime.
Everything else
Welcome · About the course · Activities and grading · Setup · Pair Notebook · Group Mini-Project · Discord
Slides are handed out in class and live in the course repository, not on this site: slides/ holds the current decks for the introduction and M01–M06, while M07–M09 are still the older decks under slides/legacy/.