ABSTRACT: How can it be possible that there are six people or less separating you from any other human being in our 6 billion people world? How can the brain, the Internet, the social network we are part of, the U.S power grid and an ecosystem have anything in common? Graph theory offers the answers to all these questions. It seems that, whether natural or man-made, complex networks exhibit the same underlying structure, which can be represented through what mathematicians now call a “small world” graph. It is obvious that complex networks are not perfectly ordered. But they are neither random. The small world graph captures the middle reality between order and randomness. My talk will look at the properties of the small world graph using relevant concrete examples and will explain why understanding the structure of complex networks could be the key to understanding how the world works.

ABSTRACT: Biometric authentication has recently received a good deal of attention as a way to bind an individual and their information, often secure information. Until recently there has been little publicly available data to assess the performance of such biometric authentication devices. Recently, the National Institute for Standards and Technology released the Biometric Score Set Release 1 (BSSR1). This data includes matching scores for both those who are enrolled in the system and those who are not. Here we present an analysis of the BSSR1 to assess the change in performance of these device over time. In particular we are interested in whether or not the error rates for these devices change over time and whether or those differences are significant.