BarabasiLab Exhibition

Date: 23 June - 9 September

Time: 17:00

Venue: Liszt Institute Brussels
1000 Brussels, Treurenberg 10.

About BarabasiLab

The BarabásiLab, established by Albert-László Barabási in 2007, is a thirty-person lab dedicated to a deeper understanding of networks—how they emerge and evolve, what they look like, and how they impact our understanding of complex systems. CCNR’s research spans a wide range of subjects, from protein interactions within a cell to how distant galaxies interact in the cosmic web to what blend of access and performance leads to success in art.

The lab consists of postdoctoral researchers and students who are working toward their PhDs. They are physicists, computer scientists, neuroscientists, designers–even art historians. In addition to his theoretical breakthroughs in network science, Barabási and his lab are renowned for producing highly creative visualizations that depict the research findings in 2-D and 3-D models. Since 1995, when he presented a paper that included illustrations of an invasion network, Barabási has made the high-definition and highly interpretive visualization of his research central to his work. Examples of BarabásiLab’s visualizations have been shown before at the Serpentine Gallery in London and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City, and is the subject of a solo show BarabásiLab: Hidden Patterns. at the Ludwig Museum in Budapest, and opened in April at ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany.

About his Series

Barabási Lab's Nature 150 series, led by Barabási Albert László, was commissioned by Nature magazine to celebrate its 150th anniversary. For the cover of the celebratory issue, they wanted to publish a cover that would be a fitting representation of the magazine's history and its role in science. The co-citation network created by the Barabási Lab for the cover visualizes the links between the more than 88,000 articles published in the magazine, with each article represented by a dot, coloured by discipline. Papers are linked if another scientific paper cites both; the dot size reflects the number of these co-citation links. The complex network reveals the relationships between papers and captures the multidisciplinary scope of the journal. As the resulting network is three-dimensional, it offers a different picture when viewed from different distances and angles. The two pieces presented here are a glimpse into this rich network of scientific publications and their impact on each other and on human knowledge.

The exhibition was realized in collaboration with the Kálmán Makláry Fine Arts Gallery.

ALBERT-LÁSZLÓ BARABÁSI (b. 1967), a Romanian-born Hungarian- American physicist, is the Robert Gray Dodge Professor of Network Science, a Distinguished University Professor of Physics, and the director of the Center for Complex Network Research at Northeastern University. He also holds an appointment in the Department of Medicine at Harvard University and runs a European Research Council project at Central European University, in Budapest, Hungary and Wiena, Austria.

In 1999, Barabási changed the course of modern science with his discovery of scale-free networks. Having mapped the World Wide Web, Barabási found—contrary to the mainstream thinking about network theory in mathematics—that network growth is not random but certain nodes within a network are more vital than others, and, most importantly, that it is possible to determine which hubs are crucial to the health of a network. With subsequent studies, Barabási would go on to prove that nearly all real networks follow his scale-free model.

Barabási is the recipient of the 2018 Moholy-Nagy Prize, for his humanistic approach to technology, and of numerous science awards, including Italy’s Lagrange-CRT Foundation Prize for outstanding interdisciplinary research, and the US National Academy of Sciences’ Cozzarelli Prize for scientific excellence and originality. He has written several popular books— The Formula (2018), Bursts (2010), and Linked (2002)—and is the author of the award-winning textbooks Network Science (2016) and Fractal Concepts in Surface Growth (1995). Additionally, Barabási co-edited Network Medicine (2017) and The Structure and Dynamics of Networks (2006). His books have been translated into more than twenty languages.

Barabási has been a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Complex Networks since 2012 and is a frequent speaker at the organization’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. His 2019 TEDx Talk, “The Real Relationship Between Your Age and Your Chance of Success,” has had more than 3.4 million views.