Kleinberg

Jon Kleinberg, the Tisch University Professor of Computer Science, will receive the 2013 ACM SIGKDD Innovation Award from the Association for Computing Machinery at the 19th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, Aug. 11 in Chicago. Kleinberg will present the Innovation Award Lecture immediately after the award presentations.

The award is considered the highest for technical excellence in the field of knowledge discovery and data mining (KDD).

Kleinberg is probably best known for his work on social and information networks. His works include the hubs and authorities algorithm for computing importance scores of nodes in a graph (an important part of Google’s ranking of search results), methods for predicting the occurrence of new links in networks, and an algorithm for maximizing the spread of influence through a social network. He discovered that networks evolve by the network diameter shrinking, at the same time becoming denser as the number of connections grows faster than the number of nodes. He was the first to realize that Stanley Milgram's famous “six degrees of separation” experiment implied not only that there exist short paths between individuals in social networks but also that people seem to be good at finding those paths. Most recently, he has been interested in developing methods for studying social phenomena on the Internet.

Kleinberg received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, also known as the “genius grant,” in 2005 and the Nevanlinna Prize in 2006, an award that is given once every four years as the premier distinction in computational mathematics. He also has received an NSF CAREER Award, an ONR Young Investigator Award, a Packard Foundation Fellowship and a Sloan Foundation Fellowship. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences.