SNA All-Star: Albert-László Barabási

Albert-László Barabási is a Hungarian physicist best known for his work on network theory. His most influential work has been on the scale-free network model. A scale-free network is a connected graph or network with the property that the number of links originating from a given node exhibits a power law distribution. Barabási, along with Reka Albert, is responsible for the Barabási-Albert model, which is an algorithm for generating scale-free networks using a preferential attachment model. The preferential attachment model essentially states that the more connections a node has, the more likely it is to gain additional attachments. This applies particularly to the Internet, where new pages will generally link to hubs rather than rarely visited sites. These hubs are the most commonly linked, and are therefore more likely to be visited and more likely to obtain new linkages from other sites. This concept applies to social networks as well, where well-known/connected individuals serve as hubs, with less well-known individuals branching off from them.