News

A work from 2004 by Vito Latora, Professor of Applied Mathematics in the Centre for Complex Systems, and two co-authors has been selected for a collection of highly influential papers on statistical and nonlinear physics published in Physical Review E (PRE). The selection identifies 35 works from the journal's 33-year history that were foundational for their respective research fields.

"Model for cascading failures in complex systems" by Paolo Crucitti, Vito Latora, and Massimo Marchiori was one of three publications chosen for shaping the field of Network Dynamics, where researchers aim to understand how signals evolve in time across complex networks. Examples include data transfer over the internet or the flow of electrical energy across power grids. The work by Vito and colleagues, which has received over 1500 citations to date according to Google Scholar, was among the first to develop models for identifying where such networks are vulnerable to overloads or targeted attacks and how resulting node failures propagate through the system. These insights are crucial for devising countermeasures and improving the resilience of critical infrastructure.

At the time of publication in 2004, Vito had recently taken up his first permanent position as a lecturer at the University of Catania and also taught at the newly founded Scuola Superiore di Catania. The study's first author, Paolo Crucitti, was a Computer Engineering student at said school of excellence and one of the first master's students supervised by Vito. The third author, Massimo Marchiori, was a former colleague of Vito's from his time as a postdoctoral researcher at MIT.

Vito describes it as an exciting and productive time and explains: "I am particularly grateful to the Scuola Superiore for the support and freedom they gave us in pursuing bold and uncertain research ideas." He highlights that it was the combination of Paolo's novel modeling ideas and his own experience in the previously largely disconnected fields of dynamics and network structure which made this transformative, foundational work possible. More broadly, the work also contributed to the formation of a "lab of complexity" at the Scuola Superiore, of which Vito became the Director in 2008, serving this role until he joined Queen Mary University of London as a full professor in 2012.

Link to the full collection of influential works from Physical Review E: Over 30 years of Statistical and Nonlinear Physics in Physical Review E

Link to the original research article: Paolo Crucitti, Vito Latora, and Massimo Marchiori, "Model for cascading failures in complex systems," Phys. Rev. E 69, 045104 (2004)