Algorithm finds the network -- for genes or the Internet

Algorithm finds the network -- for genes or the Internet:

Human diseases and social networks seem to have little in common. However, at the crux of these two lies a network, communities within the network, and farther even, substructures of the communities. In a recent paper in Physical Review E 77:016104 (2008), Weixiong Zhang, Ph.D., Washington University associate professor of computer science and engineering and of genetics, along with his Ph.D. student, Jianhua Ruan, published an algorithm (a recipe of computer instructions) to automatically identify communities and their subtle structures in various networks.

Many complex systems can be represented as networks, Zhang said, including the genetic networks he studies, social networks and the Internet itself. The community structure of networks features a natural division in which the vertices in each subnetwork are highly involved with each other, though connected less strongly with the rest of the network.

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