between computers, and a resulting paradigm shift from centralized to highly distributed systems. With massive scale also comes massive instability, as node and link failures become the norm rather than the exception. For such highly volatile systems, decentralized gossip-based protocols are emerging as an approach to maintaining simplicity and scalability while achieving fault-tolerant information dissemination.

Consistency is a key property of statistical algorithms, when the data is drawn from some underlying probability distribution. Surprisingly, despite decades of work, little is known about consistency of most clustering algorithms. In this paper we investigate consistency of a popular family of spectral clustering algorithms, which cluster the data with the help of eigenvectors of graph Laplacian matrices. We show that one of the two of major classes of spectral clustering (normalized clustering) converges under some very general conditions, while the other (unnormalized), is only consistent under strong additional assumptions, which, as we demonstrate, are not always satisfied in real data. We conclude that our analysis provides strong evidence for the superiority of normalized spectral clustering in practical applications. We believe that methods used in our analysis will provide a basis for future exploration of Laplacian-based methods in a statistical setting.

The problem of measuring "similarity" of objects arises in many applications, and many domain-specific measures have been developed, e.g., matching text across documents or computing overlap among item-sets. We propose a complementary approach, applicable in any domain with object-to-object relationships, that measures similarity of the structural context in which objects occur, based on their relationships with other objects. Effectively, we compute a measure that says "two objects are similar if they are related to similar objects." This general similarity measure, called SimRank, is based on a simple and intuitive graph-theoretic model. For a given domain, SimRank can be combined with other domain-specific similarity measures. We suggest techniques for efficient computation of SimRank scores, and provide experimental results on two application domains showing the computational feasibility and effectiveness of our approach.

Summary. This paper provides a theoretical framework for analysis of consensus algorithms for multi-agent networked systems with an emphasis on the role of directed information flow, robustness to changes in network topology due to link/node failures, time-delays, and performance guarantees. An overview of basic concepts of information consensus in networks and methods of convergence and performance analysis for the algorithms are provided. Our analysis framework is based on tools from matrix theory, algebraic graph theory, and control theory. We discuss the connections between consensus problems in networked dynamic systems and diverse applications including synchronization of coupled oscillators, flocking, formation control, fast consensus in small-world networks, Markov processes and gossip-based algorithms, load balancing in networks, rendezvous in space, distributed sensor fusion in sensor networks, and belief propagation. We establish direct connections between spectral and structural properties of complex networks and the speed of information diffusion of consensus algorithms. A brief introduction is provided on networked systems with nonlocal information flow that are considerably faster than distributed systems with latticetype nearest neighbor interactions. Simulation results are presented that demonstrate the role of small-world effects on the speed of consensus algorithms and cooperative control of multi-vehicle formations.

We present a novel distributed algorithm for constructing random overlay networks that are composed of d Hamilton cycles. The protocol is completely decentralized as no globally-known server is required. The constructed topologies are expanders with O(log d n) diameter with high probability.

Given an image (or video clip, or audio song), how do we automatically assign keywords to it? The general problem is to find correlations across the media in a collection of multimedia objects like video clips, with colors, and/or motion, and/or audio, and/or text scripts. We propose a novel, graph-based approach, "MMG", to discover such cross-modal correlations. Our

We introduce a self-stabilizing group communication system for ad-hoc networks. The system design is based on random walks of mobile agents. Three possible settings for modeling the location of the processors in the ad-hoc network are presented; slow location change, complete random change, and neighbors with probability. The group membership algorithm is based on collecting and distributing information by a mobile agent. The new techniques support group membership and multicast, and also support resource allocation.

. Fitness landscapes are a valuable concept in evolutionary biology, combinatorial optimization, and the physics of disordered systems. A fitness landscape is a mapping from a configuration space that is equipped with some notion of adjacency, nearness, distance or accessibility, into the real numbers. Landscape theory has emerged as an attempt to devise suitable mathematical structures for describing the "static" properties of landscapes as well as their influence on the dynamics of adaptation. This chapter gives a brief overview on recent developments in this area, focusing on "geometrical" properties of landscapes. 1 Introduction The concept of a fitness landscape originated in theoretical biology more than seventy years ago [1]. It can be thought of as a kind of "potential function" underlying the dynamics of evolutionary optimization. Implicit in this idea is both a fitness function f that assigns a fitness value to every possible genotype (or organism), and the arrangement of t...

Abstract. We give an efficient deterministic algorithm that extracts Ω(n2γ) almost-random bits from sources where n 1 2 +γ of the n bits are uniformly random and the rest are fixed in advance. This improves upon previous constructions, which required that at least n/2 of the bits be random in order to extract many bits. Our construction also has applications in exposure-resilient cryptography, giving explicit adaptive exposure-resilient functions and, in turn, adaptive all-or-nothing transforms. For sources where instead of bits the values are chosen from [d], for d>2, we give an algorithm that extracts a constant fraction of the randomness. We also give bounds on extracting randomness for sources where the fixed bits can depend on the random bits.

Dense subgraphs of sparse graphs (communities), which appear in most real-world complex networks, play an important role in many contexts. Computing them however is generally expensive. We propose here a measure of similarities between vertices based on random walks which has several important advantages: it captures well the community structure in a network, it can be computed efficiently, and it can be used in an agglomerative algorithm to compute efficiently the community structure of a network. We propose such an algorithm, called Walktrap, which runs in time O(mn 2) and space O(n 2) in the worst case, and in time O(n 2 log n) and space O(n 2) in most real-world cases (n and m are respectively the number of vertices and edges in the input graph). Extensive comparison tests show that our algorithm surpasses previously proposed ones concerning the quality of the obtained community structures and that it stands among the best ones concerning the running time.