Luca	Dall'Asta - Politecnico di Torino #	
Spread Optimization on Networks	#
Irreversible propagation 
processes are responsible of important phenomena observed in 
real-world networks, from the spread of influence and viral 
marketing to financial contagion, liquidity-shock propagation 
and cascading failures. Motivated by recent literature in 
computer science, I will consider these dynamical processes 
from the inverse point of view of optimization over the 
initial conditions. A prototypical example is the algorithmic 
problem of finding the smallest set of initial seeds that 
maximizes the final outcome of a threshold dynamics. For this 
problem, efficient algorithms can be derived using a cavity 
approach. I will discuss some numerical results, possible 
applications and limitations of the method.