I work on empirical and theoretical problems at the intersection of computer science and the social sciences, and I am particularly interested in questions motivated by sociology and economics. I blog about these topics with Daniel Reeves at messymatters.

I hold a PhD in Applied Mathematics and a Masters in Computer Science from Cornell, and a BS in Mathematics from the University of Chicago. Following postdoctoral positions in the math departments at Stanford and the University of Southern California, I joined the Microeconomics and Social Systems group at Yahoo! Research.

• The Predictive Power of Search
  With Jake Hofman, Sébastien Lahaie, David Pennock, and Duncan Watts
  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, To Appear.

• Real and Perceived Attitude Agreement in Social Networks
  With Winter Mason and Duncan Watts
  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, To Appear.

• Assessing Respondent-Driven Sampling
  With Matthew Salganik
  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 107, No. 15, 2010, 6743-6747.
  Supporting Information - Project 90 Data

• Prediction Without Markets
  With Daniel Reeves, Duncan Watts, and David Pennock
  Proceedings of the 11th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC 2010).

• Anatomy of the Long Tail: Ordinary People With Extraordinary Tastes
  With Andrei Broder, Evgeniy Gabrilovich, and Bo Pang
  Proceedings of the Third Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2010).
  (See slides from a talk I gave at NYU)

• Contract Auctions for Sponsored Search
  With Sébastien Lahaie and Sergei Vassilvitskii
  Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Internet and Network Economics (WINE 2009).
  Short version in SIGecom Exchanges

• Collective Revelation: A Mechanism for Self-Verified, Weighted, and Truthful Predictions
  With Daniel Reeves and David Pennock
  Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC 2009).

• CentMail: Rate Limiting via Certified Micro-Donations
  With Jake Hofman, John Langford, David Pennock and Daniel Reeves
  Proceedings of the 6th Conference on Email and Anti-Spam (CEAS 2009).
  Short version at WWW 2009, Developer's Track

• Respondent-Driven Sampling as Markov Chain Monte Carlo
  With Matthew Salganik
  Statistics in Medicine, Vol. 28, No. 17, 2009, 2202-2229.

• Social Search in “Small-World” Experiments
  With Roby Muhamad and Duncan Watts
  Proceedings of the 18th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2009).

• Predictive Indexing for Fast Search
  With John Langford and Alex Strehl
  Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2008).

• Pricing Combinatorial Markets for Tournaments
  With Yiling Chen and David Pennock
  Proceedings of the 40th ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2008).

• Horseshoes in Multidimensional Scaling and Local Kernel Methods
  With Persi Diaconis and Susan Holmes
  Annals of Applied Statistics, Vol. 2, No. 3, 2008, 777-807.

• An Invisible Minority: Asian-Americans in Mathematics
  Notices of the American Mathematical Society, Vol. 53, No. 8, 2006, 878-882.

• Analysis of Top to Bottom-k Shuffles
  Annals of Applied Probability, Vol. 16, No. 1, 2006, 30-55.

• Mixing Time Bounds via the Spectral Profile
  With Ravi Montenegro and Prasad Tetali
  Electronic Journal of Probability, Vol. 11, 2006, 1-26.

• Modified Logarithmic Sobolev Inequalities for Some Models of Random Walk
  Stochastic Processes and Their Applications, Vol. 114, 2004, 51-79.