Lindsay France/University Photography

Jon Kleinberg, chair of Information Science, teaches one of his classes.

Professor Jon Kleinberg, chair of Information Science, will give the spring 2016 Phi Beta Kappa Invitational Lecture on “Mapping the Online World: Social Connectedness in the Digital Age,” Wednesday, April 13, at 4:30 p.m. in Goldwin Smith Hall’s Lewis Auditorium.

“As an increasing amount of social interaction moves online, we can use computational ideas to study human phenomena that were once essentially invisible to us: how our social networks are organized, how groups of people come together, and how information spreads through society,” Kleinberg said. “We will explore some of the things that we’ve learned through this computational perspective, including the role of algorithms in shaping our online experience, and the evolving nature of social connectedness in the digital age.”

Kleinberg is the Tisch University Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Information Science at Cornell. His research focuses on issues at the interface of networks and information, with an emphasis on the social and information networks that underpin the web and other online media. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he has served on the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council and the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Advisory Committee of the National Science Foundation. He is the recipient of research fellowships from the MacArthur, Packard, Sloan and Simons foundations, and his awards include the Harvey Prize, the Nevanlinna Prize and the ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences.

Past Phi Beta Kappa Invitational Lecturers include Cornell faculty members Roald Hoffmann, Steven Strogatz, Isaac Kramnick, Steve Squyres and Kenneth McClane.