Kleinberg wins $150,000 computer science prize


Kleinberg

Jon Kleinberg, the Tisch University Professor of computer science, is the recipient of the 2008 ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences for his contributions to improving Web search techniques that allow billions of Web users worldwide to find relevant, credible information on the Internet.

ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) is the world's largest educational and scientific computing society. This award, one of its most prestigious, includes a stipend of $150,000 provided by an endowment from the Infosys Foundation.

Kleinberg authored an influential algorithm that rates Web pages for their links to other pages (known as hubs) as well as the links they receive (known as authorities). This Hubs and Authorities algorithm along with Google's PageRank algorithm appeared at a time when Web search techniques were based on keyword indexing. It fundamentally changed the direction of research and commercial activity on the Web.

Kleinberg also developed a model to predict an optimal way in which social connections could be distributed for the network to guide messages between distant pairs of people. His work has had a direct effect on the design of peer-to-peer systems and on Web crawling techniques that index downloaded pages to provide faster searches.

To determine how different topics and ideas evolve on the Web, he created search techniques that track words and phrases that "burst" or jump in frequency over time, revealing when different topics are active. His current research on meme-tracking -- how ideas propagate around the net -- and the news cycle uses words and phrases appearing in news articles and blogs to see how stories compete for news coverage each day and how certain stories persist while others fade quickly.

In 2005 Kleinberg was named a MacArthur Fellow. He was awarded the Nevanlinna Mathematics Prize in 2006, and in 2008 he was named one of the "20 Best Brains Under 40" by Discover magazine. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Kleinberg received an A.B. in computer science and mathematics from Cornell and a Ph.D. in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has been a member of the Cornell faculty since 1996, as well as a visiting scientist at IBM's Almaden Research Center. He teaches courses on algorithm design and networking.

 

Media Contact

Blaine Friedlander