Figure 1. From extra-professional research appearing in the 2016 American Alpine Journal [
link].
Johan Ugander
Assistant Professor,
Management Science & Engineering (MS&E)
David Morgenthaler II Faculty Fellow
School of Engineering
Stanford University
My research develops algorithmic and statistical frameworks for analyzing social networks, social systems, and other large-scale data-rich contexts. I am particularly interested in the challenges of causal inference and experimentation in these complex domains. My work commonly falls at the intersections of machine learning, probability theory, statistics, optimization, graph theory, and algorithm design.
Within MS&E I am a member of the Social Algorithms Lab (SOAL). I am also among the faculty co-directors of the RAIN Seminar.
At Stanford I am also affiliated with the Institute for Computational & Mathematical Engineering (ICME) and the Center for Computational Social Science.
I obtained my Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Cornell University in 2014, advised by Jon Kleinberg.
I also hold degrees from the University of Cambridge and Lund University; before that I attended Deep Springs College.
From 2010-14 I held an affiliation with the Facebook Data Science team.
In 2014-15 I spent one year as a post-doctoral researcher at Microsoft Research, hosted by Eric Horvitz. I joined the Stanford faculty in September 2015.
[third person bio] [serious photo]
Contact me: jugander {at} stanford.edu
Visiting address: Huang Engineering Center 357, 475 Via Ortega, Stanford, CA 94305-4121
See also: twitter, medium, research blog
News
- Spring 2018: Teaching MS&E135: Networks at the undergraduate level and MS&E234: Data Privacy and Ethics at the masters level.
- July 12-13, 2018: Co-chairing the SIAM Workshop on Network Science, Portland, OR.
- March 26, 2018: Talk at CMU, Heinz College.
- March 19, 2018: New paper in Nature Human Behaviour (with Kristen Altenburger): Monophily in social networks introduces similarity among friends-of-friends.
- February 6, 2018: Talk at Northwestern, SONIC group.
- January 11-12, 2018: Talk at JMM, San Diego, AMS Special Session on Network Science.
- Fall 2017: Teaching MS&E334: Topics in Social Data aimed at Ph.D. students.
- November 20-21, 2017: Talk at UMich, Complex Systems.
- October 2017: Visiting Boston for CODE@MIT.
- June 2017: New paper at EC (with Jon Kleinberg and Sendhil Mullainathan): Comparison-Based Choices.
- May 2017: Invited talk at GraphEx 2017 in Boston.
- May 2017: Invited keynote at the Observational Studies through Social Media (OSSM) 2017 Workshop in Montreal.
- April 2017: Awarded NSF CRII grant, information here. Thanks NSF!
- February 2017: Daughter Matilda born!
- January 2017: New paper in PNAS (with Isabel Kloumann and Jon Kleinberg): Block models and personalized PageRank.
- December 2016: New paper at NIPS (with Stephen Ragain): Pairwise Choice Markov Chains.
Ph.D. students
Publications
See also my
Google Scholar profile.
-
KM Altenburger, J Ugander
Monophily in social networks introduces similarity among friends-of-friends
Nature Human Behaviour, 2018.
[Supplementary Information]
[NHB page]
[arXiv]
[code]
-
J Kleinberg, S Mullainathan, J Ugander
Comparison-Based Choices
Proc. 18th ACM Conf. on Economics and Computation (EC), 2017.
[talk slides, EC]
[talk video, EC]
-
B Fosdick, D Larremore, J Nishimura, J Ugander
Configuring Random Graph Models with Fixed Degree Sequences
(in press, SIAM Review)
[talk slides, NetSci by Dan Larremore] [code]
- D Eckles, B Karrer, J Ugander
Design and analysis of experiments in networks: Reducing bias from interference
Journal of Causal Inference, 2017.
[arXiv pre-print]
-
I Kloumann, J Ugander, J Kleinberg
Block models and personalized PageRank
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) 114(1):33-38, 2017.
[talk slides, Google Research] [arXiv pre-print]
-
S Ragain, J Ugander
Pairwise Choice Markov Chains
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) 29, 2016.
[talk slides, CODE@MIT] [Code and data]
-
J Ugander, R Drapeau, C Guestrin
The Wisdom of Multiple Guesses
Proc. 16th ACM Conf. on Economics and Computation (EC), 2015.
[talk slides, EC] [Code and data]
-
AZ Jacobs, SF Way, J Ugander, A Clauset
Assembling thefacebook: Using Heterogeneity to Understand Online Social Network Assembly
Proc. 7th ACM Int'l Conf. on Web Science (WebSci), 2015.
[talk slides, ICCSS by Abigail Jacobs]
[Supplementary data]
- J Ugander, B Karrer, L Backstrom, J Kleinberg
Graph Cluster Randomization: Network Exposure to Multiple Universes
Proc. 19th ACM SIGKDD Int'l Conf. on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), 2013.
[talk video, KDD]
- J Nishimura, J Ugander
Restreaming Graph Partitioning: Simple Versatile Algorithms for Advanced Balancing
Proc. 19th ACM SIGKDD Int'l Conf. on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), 2013.
[Cython implementation by Justin Vincent]
- J Ugander, L Backstrom, J Kleinberg
Subgraph Frequencies: Mapping the Empirical and Extremal Geography of Large Graph Collections
Proc. 22nd Int'l World Wide Web Conf. (WWW), 2013.
[talk slides, WWW]
[Summary and R code]
- DM Romero, C Tan, and J Ugander
On the Interplay Between Social and Topical Structure
Proc. 7th AAAI Int'l Conf. on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), 2013.
[talk slides, ICWSM by Chenhao Tan]
- J Ugander, L Backstrom
Balanced Label Propagation for Partitioning Massive Graphs
Proc. 6th ACM Int'l Conf. on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM), 2013.
(Best Student Paper Award)
[talk slides, WSDM]
- J Ugander, L Backstrom, C Marlow, J Kleinberg
Structural Diversity in Social Contagion
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 109(16) 5962-5966, 17 April 2012.
[talk slides, NetSci]
- J Ugander, B Karrer, L Backstrom, C Marlow
The Anatomy of the Facebook Social Graph.
arXiv, 2011.
- L Backstrom, P Boldi, M Rosa, J Ugander, S Vigna
Four Degrees of Separation
Proc. 4th ACM Int'l Conf. on Web Science (WebSci), 2012.
(Best Paper Award)
[HyperANF metadata and degree distributions]
- M Larsson, J Ugander
A Concave Regularization Technique for Sparse Mixture Models
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) 24, 2011.
[NIPS poster]
- J Ugander, MJ Dunlop, RM Murray
Analysis of a Digital Clock for Molecular Computing
Proc. 2007 American Control Conference (ACC), New York, July 2007. p. 1595-1599.
Theses
Teaching
- MS&E 135: Networks (Spring 2018, Winter 2017, Spring 2016)
This course provides an introduction to how networks underly our social, technological, and natural worlds, with an emphasis on developing intuitions for broadly applicable concepts in network analysis. The course will include: an introduction to graph theory and graph concepts; social networks; information networks; the aggregate behavior of markets and crowds; network dynamics; information diffusion; the implications of popular concepts such as "six degrees of separation", the "friendship paradox", and the "wisdom of crowds".
- MS&E 334: Topics in Social Data (Fall 2017)
Previous versions: Fall 2016, Fall 2015
This course provides a in-depth survey of methods research for the analysis of large-scale social and behavioral data. There will be a particular focus on recent developments in discrete choice theory and preference learning. Connections will be made to graph-theoretic investigations common in the study of social networks. Topics will include random utility models, item-response theory, ranking and learning to rank, centrality and ranking on graphs, and random graphs. The course is intended for Ph.D. students, but masters students with an interested in research topics are welcome. Recommended: 221, 226, CS161, or equivalents.
Activities
I am serving/have served on the Program Committee
of the following conferences/workshops:
-
2018: ACM EC, ACM WSDM, WWW, SIAM NS (chair)
-
2017: ACM WSDM, WWW (senior PC), NIPS (reviewer)
-
2016:
ACM EC, ICCSS, ACM KDD, SIAM NS, AAAI IJCAI, AAAI ICWSM (senior PC), WWW, SIAM SDM
-
2015: ACM EC, ICCSS, ACM KDD, WWW, SIAM SDM
-
2014: SocInfo, ACM CIKM, AAAI ICWSM, WWW
-
2013: WebSci
I have organized or otherwise been involved in the following workshops:
I have also served as a reviewer for the following journals:
-
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences;
Science;
SIAM Review;
Network Science (CUP);
Journal of Complex Networks (Oxford);
Journal of the American Statistical Association;
Annals of Applied Statistics (IMS);
Management Science (INFORMS);
Transactions on Network Science & Engineering (IEEE);
Social Network Analysis and Mining (Springer);
Scientific Reports (NPG);
PLOS One;
Physical Review X.
Figure 2. The summit of Fairview Dome, Yosemite National Park, July 2012.
Press coverage
- BBC Radio 4: Digital Human, May 2016: Lost and Found
- MIT Technology Review (blog), April 2015: Network Archaeologists Discover Two Types of Social Network Growth
- Wall Street Journal (blog), June 2014: Studying Your Users: Facebook's Greatest Hits
- Facebook Engineering Blog, April 2014: Large-scale graph partitioning with Apache Giraph
- Wired (blog), April 2013: Exploring the Space of Human Interaction
- SmartPlanet, October 2012: Q&A: Why you have fewer friends than your friends on Facebook
- NY Times Opinionator, September 2012: Friends You Can Count On
- Nature, August 2012: Computational Social Science: Making the Links
- American Mathematical Society, July 2012: SIAM Annual Meeting 2012 Highlights
- Science Now, April 2012: How Facebook "Contagion" Spreads
- New Scientist, April 2012: Variety, Not Viral Spread, is Key to Facebook Growth
- The Economist, April 2012: Social Contagion: Conflicting Ideas
- The Economist Daily Chart, March 2012: The Sun Never Sets
- The Telegraph, March 2012: Facebook: British Empire Still Shapes Friendship Patterns
- NPR (on-air interview), November 2011: 4.74 Degrees of Separation
- Wired, Novemeber 2011: Facebook Study: It's a Small(er) World After All
- TechCrunch, Novemeber 2011: 4.74 - Facebook Wins By Getting Us Closer Than Six Degrees
- NY Times, November 2011: Between You and Me? 4.74 Degrees
Bookmarklets
- scholarfy: a bookmarklet I wrote to transfer search queries to Google Scholar.
- JSTORpdf: a bookmarklet I wrote to access PDFs faster on JSTOR.
- googURL: a bookmarklet I wrote to circumvent some paywalls using Google.
Climbing
My wife and I spend a lot of our free time climbing. Sometimes we write trip reports.
First ascents:
Other trip reports:
I also enjoy trail running. Very occasionally I'll run
competitively.
Misc