Market and Social Systems Engineering
MKSE KICK-OFF: Friday, November 11, 2011. Learn More >>
The Rajendra and Neera Singh Program in Market and Social Systems Engineering (MKSE) is the world's first course of study to fully integrate the disciplines needed to design and analyze the complex networks that are reshaping our society.
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| Visualization of an early online social network, circa 1999 |
Networks – including communication networks like the Internet, modern social networks such as Facebook, and traditional organizational and economic networks – have touched virtually every aspect of our modern life: from business and investments, to communication and information access, to scientific discovery and medicine, to government information and security. For example, the Internet has tremendous power to foster communication and to support the exchange of content, with anyone, anywhere – at minimal cost. To understand the Internet, to predict behavior on it, and to design new capabilities and services for it, we must study it as an assembly of people and systems, interlinked by a technological network with particular structure and properties. These are the foci of the Singh Program on Market and Social Systems Engineering – which studies networked interactions of all varieties, and pays particular attention to the interplay of technology, economics and sociology in networked settings. Considering the Internet as just one of many case studies, let us consider how these topics interact.
Questions Considered in the Program
Here are some of the questions that students will be able to answer:
- How does Google or YouTube manage to instantaneously handle the requests of millions of concurrent users?
- How does Facebook determine who to recommend as “friends”?
- How do Google and Yahoo make a profit by selling “search terms” to advertisers, at a price governed by the popularity and demand of the search term?
- How do search services determine the relevance of individual documents to a given query? And how do other companies make money by “tricking” the search services into giving higher ranking to certain customers?
- How is it that the Internet -- a shared network operated by many parties -- manages to achieve such a high level of robustness and reliability?
More general questions include:
- How do we develop schemes (protocols) for conducting transactions, with the appropriate incentives to encourage proper behavior?
- What is an optimal strategy for participants in a multiplayer game, or an electronic market, with particular properties?
Applications for this program will be available beginning Fall 2010, with the first students enrolled for the Fall 2011 semester.