Polytechnic University of Catalonia

Abstract: The Internet has a very complex connectivity recently modeled by the class of scale-free networks. This feature, which appears to be very efficient for a communications network, favors at the same time the spreading of computer viruses. We analyze real data from computer virus infections and find the average lifetime and persistence of viral strains on the Internet. We define a dynamical model for the spreading of infections on scale-free networks, finding the absence of an epidemic threshold and its associated critical behavior. This new epidemiological framework rationalizes data of computer viruses and could help in the understanding of other spreading phenomena on communication and social networks.

Abstract: We present graph attention networks (GATs), novel neural network architectures that operate on graph-structured data, leveraging masked self-attentional layers to address the shortcomings of prior methods based on graph convolutions or their approximations. By stacking layers in which nodes are able to attend over their neighborhoods' features, we enable (implicitly) specifying different weights to different nodes in a neighborhood, without requiring any kind of costly matrix operation (such as inversion) or depending on knowing the graph structure upfront. In this way, we address several key challenges of spectral-based graph neural networks simultaneously, and make our model readily applicable to inductive as well as transductive problems. Our GAT models have achieved or matched state-of-the-art results across four established transductive and inductive graph benchmarks: the Cora, Citeseer and Pubmed citation network datasets, as well as a protein-protein interaction dataset (wherein test graphs remain unseen during training).

Abstract: Complex networks arise in a wide range of biological and sociotechnical systems. Epidemic spreading is central to our understanding of dynamical processes in complex networks, and is of interest to physicists, mathematicians, epidemiologists, and computer and social scientists. This review presents the main results and paradigmatic models in infectious disease modeling and generalized social contagion processes.

Abstract: In this paper a constitutive model based on an internal variable-formulation of plasticity theory for the non-linear analysis of concrete is presented. The model uses a new yield criterion which matches experimental data quite well and it accounts for both elastic and plastic stiffness degradations effects. Onset and amount of cracking can be studied by a simple postprocessing of the finite-element plasticity solution. The accuracy of the model is checked with some examples of application.

Abstract: Research on a new metaheuristic for optimization is often initially focused on proof-of-concept applications. It is only after experimental work has shown the practical interest of the method that researchers try to deepen their understanding of the method's functioning not only through more and more sophisticated experiments but also by means of an effort to build a theory. Tackling questions such as "how and why the method works" is important, because finding an answer may help in improving its applicability. Ant colony optimization, which was introduced in the early 1990s as a novel technique for solving hard combinatorial optimization problems, finds itself currently at this point of its life cycle. With this article we provide a survey on theoretical results on ant colony optimization. First, we review some convergence results. Then we discuss relations between ant colony optimization algorithms and other approximate methods for optimization. Finally, we focus on some research efforts directed at gaining a deeper understanding of the behavior of ant colony optimization algorithms. Throughout the paper we identify some open questions with a certain interest of being solved in the near future.