In Febuary 2012, I together with Ms. Xun Dai (on my left) and Ms. Chun He(on my right) participated in the MCM/ICM mathematics modelling contest. We won a Meritorious prize with a model measuring the opportunity of commercial crime in a social network. During 4 days time of the competition , Ms. Xun Dai, Ms. Chun He and I worked together as a team.

    The Interdisciplinary Contest in Modeling (ICM) is an international contest for high school students and college undergraduates. The contest is held annualy by COMAP, the Consortium for Mathematics and Its Applications, is an award-winning non-profit organization whose mission is to improve mathematics education for students of all ages. Since 1980, COMAP has worked with teachers, students, and business people to create learning environments where mathematics is used to investigate and model real issues in our world.

From Left to right:Xun Dai, I, and He Chun.

This picture was taken after we know we got the prize.

    The problem for 2012 is to design a model measuring the possibility of each person participating in commercial crimes in a social network based on the communication records of the social network. There are two main tasks in this contest. The first step is to design a model based on a previous case in which both the statistics of communication records and the list of criminals are given. The second step is to predic the list of suspects by applying the model we had just built to a new case where we only have the communication record.

    After analysed the problem, we found that there are many factors that would influence the result ,so we decided to use an AHP(Analyti Hierarchy Process) model to solve this problem. In the first 2 days, we focused on looking for reasonable factors and proper weights for each factor that can be used to derive the result of the first given case and explained why and how they works. Then we moved on to apply our model to the new case and analyse and evaluate the final result that we get from our model.

    In the model we designed we used some ideas and concept that we just learned  in a previous course about internet protocols. We borrowed some algorithms like Hop-Count to measure the relations between two nodes in a network.  In order to make our model to be more pursuassive and accurate, we didn't simply use those algorithms but looked into their features and mechanisms in detail so that we can explain why it was necessary to use them and how they were going to influence our model.

    Luckly, our model won the Meritozious Prize(top 10%) which put a wonderful end to this story.

To learn more detailed design of our mathematical model click here.