[Colloq] Thesis Proposal: Nicholas Blumm

[Nicole Bekerian]

The College of Computer and Information Science presents a PhD proposal presentation

Speaker: Nicholas Blumm

Date: Wednesday, Dec 18, 2011
Time: 2:00pm
Location: Center for Complex Network Research, Dana Building, 5th Floor

Title:
Quantifying the Dynamics of Ranked Systems

Abstract:
People love ranked lists, from search results, to diseases (“the number one killer...”), to cities (“the largest city in the world”).
With the ubiquity of ranking, it is important to understand the stability of each system. Consider, for example a top-ten list of bestselling books. One may ask how many of these ten will remain on top in one year? Ten years? One hundred years?

We analyze empirical data capturing real time ranking from social media to medicine, economics and linguistics, helping identify the common mechanisms that drive the dynamics of ranking. We explore a general theory to quantify any set of ranked items over time. We show that parameters of our theory can be explicitly measured from data. Such work has applications in areas ranging from sales of books to popularity of websites to investments in companies.

Committee:
* Albert-László Barabási (advisor)
* Javed Aslam
* Alan Mislove
* Zoltán Toroczkai (external)


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Best, 
Nicole 

______________________________________________________________ 

Nicole Bekerian 
Administrative Assistant 

Northeastern University 
College of Computer and Information Science 
360 Huntington Ave. 
202 West Village H 
Boston, MA 02115 

Phone: 617.373.2462 
Fax: 617.373.5121