Hi everyone, This week at the Applied Statistics Workshop we will be welcoming Tina Eliassi-Rad, an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Northeastern University. She will be presenting work entitled "The Reasonable Effectiveness of Roles in Complex Networks." Please find the abstract below and on the website. We will meet in CGIS Knafel Room 354 at noon and lunch will be provided. See you all there! Best, Pam Title: The Reasonable Effectiveness of Roles in Complex Networks Abstract: Given a network, how can we automatically discover roles (or functions) of nodes? Roles compactly represent structural behaviors of nodes and generalize across various networks. Examples of roles include "clique-members," "periphery-nodes," "bridges," etc. Are there good features that we can extract for nodes that indicate role-membership? How are roles different from communities and from equivalences (from sociology)? What are the applications in which these discovered roles can be effectively used? In this talk, we address these questions, provide unsupervised and supervised algorithms for role discovery, and discuss why roles are so effective in many applications from transfer learning to re-identification to anomaly detection to mining time-evolving networks and multi-relational graphs.