Societal Benefits of Network Science

摘要

The news story"stepping away from the trees for a look at the forest" (17 December 2010, Science News staff, special section on Insights of the Decade, p. 1612) describes the potential of network science to solve complex problems, including the use of crowd-sourcing. Network science has also been applied to disaster response, such as the aftermath of the magnitude 7.0 M_w earthquake in Haiti in 2010. An open-source technology named Ushahidi ("testimony" in Swahili) (7) was used to create high-resolution maps of accessible roads through integration of more than 80,000 text messages and geographic information systems.