Abstract:
The working metaphor for the Web in its early days was that of a `universal encyclopedia,' a repository containing vast amounts of human knowledge. More recently, our view has shifted to incorporate more dynamic forms of information and a more explicit `time axis' -- the Web as a current-awareness medium, supporting on-line news, chat, discussion, commentary, and emerging media such as weblogs. Many factors have contributed to this evolution of Web information; a crucial one is the way in which technological and social networks have become intertwined, enabling new topics, ideas, and behaviors to cascade along an underlying social network of interaction that parallels the hyperlinks of the Web itself. In this talk, I will discuss some of the current approaches to the challenges that are raised by these issues, including new algorithms to analyze the rich array of temporal phenomena that abound in current information networks, and search techniques that can handle the temporal fluctuations and bursty dynamics of on-line topics.
Biography:
Jon Kleinberg received his A.B. from Cornell in 1993 and his Ph.D. in computer science from MIT in 1996. He subsequently spent a year as a Visiting Scientist at the IBM Almaden Research Center, and is now an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. His research interests are centered around algorithmic issues at the interface of networks and information, with an emphasis on the network structures that underpin the Web and other on-line media. He is the recipient of an NSF Career Award, an ONR Young Investigator Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, a David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship, teaching awards from the Cornell Engineering College and Computer Science Department, and the 2001 National Academy of Sciences Award for Initiatives in Research, given annually to one U.S. scientist under the age of 35.
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