April 28, 2015
Location: McCaw Hall, Arrillaga Alumni Center
Speaker: Jure Leskovec, Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Talk Title: Web: A Technological and a Social Network
The Internet and the Web fundamentally changed how we live our daily lives as well as broadened the scope of computer science. Today the Web is a `sensor' that captures the pulse of humanity and allows us to observe phenomena that were once essentially invisible to us. These phenomena include the social interactions and collective behavior of hundreds of millions of people, recorded at unprecedented levels of scale and resolution. Analyzing this data offers novel algorithmic as well as computational challenges. Moreover, it offers new insights into the design of information systems in the presence of complex social feedback effects, as well as a new perspective on fundamental questions in the social sciences.
Jure Leskovec is assistant professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. His research focuses on mining large social and information networks. Problems he investigates are motivated by large scale data, the Web and on-line media. This research has won several awards including a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and numerous best paper awards. Leskovec received his bachelor's degree in computer science from University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and his PhD in in machine learning from the Carnegie Mellon University and postdoctoral training at Cornell University. You can follow him on Twitter @jure