Jon M. Kleinberg, Tisch University Professor of Computer Science and Information Science at Cornell University, will deliver a briefing on Capitol Hill, Washington, D.C., June 13th, 2019 from noon to 1:30 pm. The Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) and the American Mathematical Society (AMS) have invited Kleinberg to speak at the Rayburn House Office Building (Room 2043).
At the congressional briefing, Kleinberg’s focus is “Addressing Threats and Vulnerabilities in Critical Interconnected Systems: Common Principles in Disease Outbreaks, Internet Malware, and Bank Failures,” about which he says: “A vital feature of many critical systems in society is their connectivity—they are built from large numbers of components linked together in a network. This structure makes it possible to build them at large scales, but it also puts them at risk of cascading breakdowns, when a problem in one component spreads to others. We consider mathematical models originally developed for epidemic diseases, where a small change in the connectivity of the population or the infectiousness of the disease can lead to large changes in the reach of the outbreak. We then consider how these models apply when developing detection techniques and countermeasures for risks to highly interconnected systems, including malware on the Internet and failures in banking systems.”