Informatics lecturer awarded Leverhulme Funding

Dr Sophia Tsoka, a lecturer in the Department of Informatics, has been awarded £185,267 from the Leverhulme Trust for a project on community structure detection in complex networks. The project is in collaboration with University College London and will run for two years.

Complex networks (where nodes represent the entities of a system under study and edges show the interactions that take place between these entities) arise in a variety of scientific contexts, for example in biological, physical, social and computer science applications. Such networks exhibit certain properties, including community structure, which occurs when nodes in a particular group are more densely connected with nodes within the group than they are with nodes outside of the group. Community structure detection is the partition of a network into such densely connected groups and is a popular method of revealing the underlying properties of the network and its constituent entities.

Work in this project will involve the use of mathematical programming as a modelling framework to extend traditional community detection methods into more realistic and challenging applications that include dynamic features, causal relations or strength of interactions.

Dr Sophia Tsoka is a member of the Algorithms and Bioinformatics Research Group. Her research interests include computational genomics, systems biology and biomedical data mining. For more information, please contact Sophia Tsoka (sophia.tsoka@kcl.ac.uk).