I am going to talk about Dr. Jure Leskovec who was born in Slovenia in May 1980 (The same year I was born in!!) He and I share common research interest, social network analysis. He is famous for the work he has done so far in his research area.
His research focuses on mining and modeling large social and information networks, their evolution, and spread of information, influence and viruses over them. Problems he investigate are motivated by large scale data, the Web and other on-line media.
It was last month that I saw his presentation video through videolectures.net, which was recorded at ACM KDD-08, the 14th International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, in August 2008. He talked about the microscopic evolution of social networks. Click on the image below to hear his very special English speaking.
His Presentation on Microscopic Evolution of Social Networks
at ACM SIGKDD 2008, Las Vegas.
He is a very young scholar. He got his Ph.D. from Machine Learning Department, School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in September 2008. (Just a month ago!) He is currently working with Dr. Jon Kleinberg as a post-doc at Cornell University. More surprisingly, he will be joining the Computer Science Department at Stanford University as an assistant professor in Fall 2009! (Wow!) Research institutions he has interned so far include Yahoo! Research, Microsoft Research, and HP Labs. I think he could get invaluable data for his research from these institutions.
There's a lot I need to learn from him. A few weeks ago, I presented his work to my social network study group. I will continue reading his papers and find room for improvement. I think this is a good way to publish a paper for those in Research 101. He is one of the best models I need to follow; he got Best Paper Award from KDD-07. I hope I can collaborate with him in the future. :)
For more information about him, stop by his homepage at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jure/
You may also be interested in another famous person in the field of complex network. That is Dr. Reka Albert. She is an associate Professor of Physics and also an affiliate professor of IST. Like Dr. Jure Leskovec, she is very young. What is really impressive is Dr. Albert published two articles in Nature even before she earned her Ph.D.
Hi Shuguang. Thank you for your comment. Though I once visited her homepage, I didn't realize that she is such a wonderful scholar. I am now impressed by what she has done so far for her research. Yes, there may be a lot of precious things I should learn from her. Thanks again!
I am surprised you choose a future assistant professor:) He is smart and will be famous if everything works out well, but not famous now. He may still need some milestone research to establish his fame.
You are right, Kang. He is not that famous as a scholar. However, he had been "a star Ph.D. student" before he graduated from CMU. He published almost 30 papers during his Ph.D. study, mostly in first-tier venues. He received two best paper awards from ACM SIGKDD in 2005 and 2007 respectively; one that was published in 2005 has been cited by 122 other papers according to Google Scholar. This is definitely an incredible number. Also, his current h-index is 9, which is NOT a very high number for a great scholar but is relatively high for a Ph.D. student. I thought that I need to target a model that I "CAN" possibly follow, though it is not easy to follow his model at all. I did not want to talk about a person that is on another planet. Anyhow, thank you, Kang, for your comment. I like your critiques.