Kleinberg

Jon Kleinberg, the Tisch University Professor of Computer Science, has been awarded the 2009 Katayanagi Emerging Leadership Prize, which honors a researcher who demonstrates the promise of becoming a leader in the field.

The prize, which includes an honorarium of $5,000, is presented annually by Carnegie Mellon University in cooperation with the Tokyo University of Technology.

"Jon Kleinberg has led a major wave in the analysis of society-scale networks, describing such phenomena as how Web pages link to one another, and who has befriended whom on social media sites," said Randal E. Bryant, dean of Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science. "His work has formed fundamentally new connections between computer science and social science."

The award was presented Jan. 21 at Carnegie Mellon, where Kleinberg delivered a lecture on his research that analyzed how online stories evolve, compete for attention and collectively produce an effect that commentators refer to as the "news cycle." He currently is involved in several collaborations between Cornell computer scientists, sociologists and economists.

Kleinberg is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has received MacArthur, Packard and Sloan Foundation fellowships. He is a recipient of the Nevanlinna Prize, the ACM-Infosys Foundation Award and the National Academy of Sciences Award for Initiatives in Research.

The Katayanagi Prize honors and is endowed by Koh Katayanagi, director of the Katayanagi Institute at Tokyo University of Technology. Katayanagi was a leader in promoting technical education to help rebuild Japan's industry after World War II.