Informatics Professor appointed Collaborating Research Scholar at University of Oxford

Professor Colin Cooper from the Department of Informatics has been appointed as Collaborating Research Scholar at Keeble College, University of Oxford, during 2014. The appointment is to enable joint research between King’s College London and Keeble College on the performance of random walks on large networks.

Colin Cooper, Professor in the Algorithms and Bioinformatics research group in the Department of Informatics, gave the following summary of the research.

“Random walks are a common method of search in distributed networks, and the efficiency of their performance is of considerable interest. Although by definition the path taken by a random walk in a network is difficult to predict in the short run, in fact their overall behaviour can be described quite precisely. The current research concerns the structure of the vacant set, which is the part of the network not yet visited by the walk. The figure shows a snapshot of a random walk exploring a grid network, a commonly used model in parallel computing. The blue areas are the explored parts and the white areas are the unvisited parts of the network. The overall effect is reminiscent of ice floes.”