Making Connections - Prof Manlio De Domenico

Towards a theory of network functionality in the brain and beyond Understanding how brain networks give rise to function remains a central challenge. While connectomics has revealed detailed structural organization, it is unlikely that structure alone determines function; instead, functionality emerges from the interplay between topology, dynamics, and responses to perturbations across scales. In this talk, I will present a statistical physics framework aimed at developing a predictive theory of network functionality. Using tools from statistical physics and information theory, I define function in terms of information propagation on networks and introduce a density matrix formalism to capture multiscale dynamics. When the underlying dynamics are unknown, maximum entropy principles provide the least-biased description consistent with observations, leading to a generalized thermodynamic perspective. This approach enables the quantification of functional robustness and predicts macroscopic features of real systems, including the emergence of sparse connectivity as an optimal trade-off between efficiency and diversity, across brain networks and beyond.