Speakers

Lada Adamic leads the Product Science group within Facebook's Data Science Team. She is also an adjunct associate professor at the University of Michigan's School of Information and Center for the Study of Complex Systems. Her research interests center on information dynamics in networks: how information diffuses, how it can be found, and how it influences the evolution of a network's structure. Her projects have included identifying expertise in online question and answer forums, studying the dynamics of viral marketing, and characterizing the structural and communication patterns in online social media. She has received an NSF CAREER award, a University of Michigan Henry Russell award, the 2012 Lagrange Prize in Complex Systems.

Damon Centola’s research addresses the complex dynamics of collective behaviors. One set of projects uses agent based models to understand how changes in the topology of social networks can impact the spread of social contagions. Other work uses web-based experimental methods to test these models and provide new theoretical insights into research on collective behavior. Research areas include the emergence of unpopular norms, the mobilization of committed minorities, and the polarization of cultures. This research has won the 2006, 2009 and 2011 American Sociological Association Award for Outstanding Article in Mathematical Sociology, and the 2011 Goodman Award for Outstanding Contributions to Sociological Methodology.

Moran Cerf is an Associate Professor at the Kellogg School of Management and the Neuroscience Program at Northwestern University. His research uses methods from neuroscience to understand the underlying mechanisms of our psychology, behavior changes, emotion, decision making and dreams. His works address questions such as: "How are conscious percepts formed in our brain?", "How can we control our emotions?" and "Which brain mechanisms determine if we find content engaging?" Dr. Cerf holds a Ph.D in neuroscience from Caltech, an MA in Philosophy and a B.Sc in Physics from Tel-Aviv University.

Nitesh Chawla is the Frank M. Freimann Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, and director of the research center on network and data sciences (iCeNSA) at the University of Notre Dame. He started his tenure-track career at Notre Dame in 2007, and quickly advanced from assistant professor to a chaired full professor position in nine years. He has received numerous awards for research, innovation, and teaching. He is the recipient of the 2015 IEEE CIS Outstanding Early Career Award; the IBM Watson Faculty Award, the IBM Big Data and Analytics Faculty Award, National Academy of Engineering New Faculty Fellowship, and 1st Source Bank Technology Commercialization Award. He is a twice recipient of Outstanding Teaching Award at Notre Dame. His papers have received several outstanding paper nominations and awards at top conferences and journals. In addition, his students are also recipient of several honors, including a runner up for the Outstanding Dissertation Award at KDD’17 and the second best research award at the ACM Student Research Competition at Grace Hopper Conference, 2017. In recognition of the societal and impact of his research, he was recognized with the Rodney Ganey Award and Michiana 40 Under 40. He is a two-time recipient of Outstanding Teaching Award at Notre Dame. He is founder of Aunalytics, a data science software and solutions company.

Tanzeem Choudhury directs the People Aware Computing group which develops mobile sensing systems for understanding life patterns of individuals, groups, and societies. A key mission is to change the way mental health is diagnosed and treated by creating novel wearable and mobile system that continuously track mental wellbeing. Tanzeem is a co-founder of HealthRhythms that aims to bring novel technological solutions to facilitate mental wellbeing.

Aaron Clauset is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the BioFrontiers Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder, and is External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. He received a PhD in Computer Science, with distinction, from the University of New Mexico, a BS in Physics, with honors, from Haverford College, and was an Omidyar Fellow at the prestigious Santa Fe Institute. He was the 2016 recipient of the Erdos-Renyi Prize in network science, and is currently a Deputy Editor at Science Advances for the social and interdisciplinary sciences.

Clauset is internationally recognized for his work on network science, complex systems, and computational social science. His work has appeared in Nature, Science, PNAS, JACM, WWW, ICWSM, STOC, SIAM Review, and Physical Review Letters, and has been covered in the popular press by the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Discover Magazine, New Scientist, Wired, Miller-McCune, the Boston Globe and The Guardian.

Iaian Couzin’s work aims to reveal the fundamental principles that underlie evolved collective behavior, and consequently his research includes the study of a wide range of biological systems, from insect swarms to fish schools and primate groups. In recognition of his research he has been recipient of the Searle Scholar Award in 2008, top 5 most cited papers of the decade in animal behavior research 1999-2010, the Mohammed Dahleh Award in 2009, Popular Science’s “Brilliant 10” Award in 2010, National Geographic Emerging Explorer Award in 2012 and the Scientific Medal of the Zoological Society of London in 2013.

Ferrucci is a pioneer who established new frontiers in the study of unstructured text to levels that some thought impossible to achieve. A former IBM VP and Fellow, his team pioneered advances in natural language technologies and leveraged those technologies in a variety of computational, data analytic and knowledge management solutions. Under his leadership, the group developed Deep QA (“Watson”), the cognitive computing system that beat the best human Jeopardy! champions in 2011.

Dave’s scholarship, leadership and success opened up a new field of research which moved beyond statistical correlations to integrating logic tools for improved understanding of human behavior. Not only does he continue to advance this research at Bridgewater today, but with IBM opening up Watson to developers via the cloud, a limitless number of computer scientists, sociologists and innovators will be able to trace their successes back to David, his team and his belief in forging a new trail. He has been named Innovator of the Year by R&D Magazine and Identified by Slate as among "The Most Innovative and Practical Thinkers of Our Time."

Dave holds a PhD in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a BS in Biology from Manhattan College. With this: Dave is the founder and CEO of Elemental Cognition. With Elemental Cognition, Dave sees a future in which AI “will become a powerful amplifier of human creative potential – a system based not on machine learning but natural learning that will enable humans and machines to explore, collaborate and ask 'why' together."

Professor Gonzalez works in the area of urban computing, with a focus on the intersections of people with the built environment and their social networks. Her team designs urban mobility solutions and to enable the sustainable development of smart cities. Prof. Gonzalez has introduced new tools into transportation research and is a leader in the emergent field of urban computing. Prior to joining Berkeley, Marta worked as an Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT, a member of the Operations Research Center and the Center for Advanced Urbanism. She is a member of the scientific council of technology companies such as Gran Data, PTV and the Pecan Street Project consortium.

Matthew O. Jackson is the William D. Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University and an external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute and a senior fellow of CIFAR. He was at Northwestern University and Caltech before joining Stanford, and received his BA from Princeton University in 1984 and PhD from Stanford in 1988. Jackson's research interests include game theory, microeconomic theory, and the study of social and economic networks, on which he has published many articles and the book `Social and Economic Networks'. He also teaches an online course on networks and co-teaches two others on game theory. Jackson is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a Game Theory Society Fellow, and an Economic Theory Fellow, and his other honors include the von Neumann Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Social Choice and Welfare Prize, the B.E.Press Arrow Prize for Senior Economists, and teaching awards. He has served as co-editor of Games and Economic Behavior, the Review of Economic Design, and Econometrica.

Professor Lazer is a professor of political science and computer and information science and the co-director of the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. Before joining the Northeastern faculty in fall 2009, he was an associate professor of public policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and director of its Program on Networked Governance. He holds a PhD in political science from the University of Michigan. Professor Lazer’s research centers on social networks; governance, or how the patterns of institutional relations yield functional or dysfunctional systems; and technology and its use in communication. An authority on social networks, he has written several papers on the diffusion of information among interest groups and between these groups and the government. He is the co-editor of Governance and Information Technology: From Electronic Government to Information Government and also written extensively on the use of DNA in the criminal justice system.

Marta Sales-Pardo (Barcelona, 1976) graduated in Physics at Universitat de Barcelona in 1998, and obtained a PhD in Physics from Universitat de Barcelona in 2002. She then moved to Northwestern University, where she first worked as a postdoctoral fellow and, later, as a Fulbright Scholar. In 2008, she became a Research Assistant Professor at the Northwestern University Clinical and Translational Science Institute with joint appointments in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering and the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems. In 2009, she accepted her current position as an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University Rovira i Virgili.

Duncan Watts is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research and a founding member of the MSR-NYC lab. He is also an AD White Professor at Large at Cornell University. Prior to joining MSR in 2012, he was from 2000-2007 a professor of Sociology at Columbia University, and then a principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research, where he directed the Human Social Dynamics group.

His research on social networks and collective dynamics has appeared in a wide range of journals, from Nature, Science, and Physical Review Letters to the American Journal of Sociology and Harvard Business Review, and has been recognized by the 2009 German Physical Society Young Scientist Award for Socio and Econophysics, the 2013 Lagrange-CRT Foundation Prize for Complexity Science, and the 2014 Everett Rogers M. Rogers Award.

He is also the author of three books: Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (W.W. Norton, 2003) and Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness (Princeton University Press, 1999), and most recently Everything is Obvious: Once You Know The Answer (Crown Business, 2011).

Watts holds a B.Sc. in Physics from the Australian Defence Force Academy, from which he also received his officer’s commission in the Royal Australian Navy, and a Ph.D. in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from Cornell University.