HFN Brown Bag & Speaker Series: Network Models of Organizations

Maksim Tsvetovat, Ph.D.

Center for Social Complexity and
Department of Public and International Affairs at
George Mason University

Thursday, March 15, 2007
1200 - 1300
Glasgow Hall East, Room 203
Naval Postgraduate School, 1 University Way, Monterey, CA

We live and work in complex adaptive and evolving socio-technical systems. These systems may be complex for a variety of reasons. For example, they may be complex because there is a need to coordinate many groups, because humans are interacting with technology, because there are non routine or very knowledge intensive tasks, and so on. At the heart of this complexity is a set of adaptive agents who are connected or linked to other agents forming a network and who are constrained or enabled by the world they inhabit. Computational modeling can be used to help analyze, reason about, predict the behavior of, and possibly control such complex systems of ”networked” agents.

This seminar presents a broad overview of... a number of techniques for modeling and analyzing human organizations using networks. We start from traditional network analysis and an introduction to graph-theoretic methods of thinking about networked systems, including ways to find key individuals in networks, locate points of vulnerability and cohesive subgroups. We continue to discuss networks formed by inter-organizational ties and 2-mode networks, and their use in enriching the network model.

Finally, from the components above we construct and discuss a comprehensive network model of organization, and discuss its implications on study of stability and adaptation in organizations.

Biography

Dr. Maksim Tsvetovat is an Assistant Professor at the Center for Social Complexity and department of Public and International Affairs at George Mason University, Fairfax, VA.

Maksim has received his Ph.D. from the Computation, Organizations and Society programme in the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. His dissertation was centered on use of artificial intelligence techniques such as planning and semantic reasoning as a means of studying behaviour and evolution of complex social netoworks, such as these of terrorist organizations. He has received a Master of Science degree from University of Minnesota with a specialization in Artificial Intelligence and design of Multi-Agent Systems, and has also extensively studied organization theory and social science
research methods.

His research is centered on building high-fidelity simulations of social and organizational systems using concepts from distributed artificial intelligence and multi-agent systems. Other projects focus on social network analysis for mapping of internal corporate networks or study of covert and terrorist orgnaizations. Maksim is a professional software architect and database specialist, specializing in distributed architectures.

Maksim's vita and publications can be found on:

http://www.css.gmu.edu/maksim