An illustration of a dynamic network whose members and connections change over time. This research will study the challenging setting where members' actions (colored bars) are concurrent with topological changes (dotted lines).

New project to address limitations of dynamic networks

Joshua Daymude photo

Joshua Daymude and Andrea Richa’s research to address concurrency and adaptive self-organization in anonymous dynamic networks was awarded $800,000 from the National Science Foundation. 

Assistant Professor Daymude and President’s Professor Richa are faculty members of the Biodesign Center for Biocomputing, Security and Society and the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence in the Ira A Fulton Schools of Engineering at ASU.

Distributed algorithms for dynamic networks enable innovations both within and beyond computer science, from electronic disease contact-tracing with smartphones dropping in and out of range to understanding the collective intelligence of social insects behaving as a superorganism.

The NSF funded project will address two important limitations of current algorithms for dynamic networks: 

  • assuming that network changes never occur at the same time as individuals' actions 
  • assuming that the dynamic network can perform only one task at a time. 

Designing distributed systems without these limitations will link existing theory more directly to computational, biological and social applications.