I work on empirical and theoretical problems at the intersection of computer science and the social sciences, and I am particularly interested in questions motivated by sociology and economics. I blog about these and related topics at messymatters.com.

I received a PhD in Applied Mathematics and a Masters in Computer Science from Cornell, and a BS in Mathematics from the University of Chicago. Before joining Yahoo! Research, I spent a year each in the math departments at Stanford and the University of Southern California.

1. What Can Search Predict?
   With Jake Hofman, Sébastien Lahaie, David Pennock, and Duncan Watts, Submitted.

2. Anatomy of the Long Tail: Ordinary People With Extraordinary Tastes
   With Andrei Broder, Evgeniy Gabrilovich, and Bo Pang
   Proceedings of the Third Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2010), To Appear.

3. Contract Auctions for Sponsored Search
   With Sébastien Lahaie and Sergei Vassilvitskii
   Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Internet and Network Economics (WINE 2009).

4. Diversity, Deliberation, and Awareness of Political Attitudes in Social Networks
   With Winter Mason and Duncan Watts, Submitted.

5. Collective Revelation: A Mechanism for Self-Verified, Weighted, and Truthful Predictions
   With Daniel Reeves and David Pennock
   Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC 2009).

6. CentMail: Rate Limiting via Certified Micro-Donations
   With Jake Hofman, John Langford, David Pennock and Daniel Reeves
   Proceedings of the 6th Conference on Email and Anti-Spam (CEAS 2009).
   Short version at WWW 2009, Developer's Track

7. Respondent-Driven Sampling as Markov Chain Monte Carlo
   With Matthew Salganik
   Statistics in Medicine, Vol. 28, No. 17, 2009, 2202-2229.

8. Social Search in “Small-World” Experiments
   With Roby Muhamad and Duncan Watts
   Proceedings of the 18th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2009).

9. Predictive Indexing for Fast Search
   With John Langford and Alex Strehl
   Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2008).

10. Pricing Combinatorial Markets for Tournaments
    With Yiling Chen and David Pennock
    Proceedings of the 40th ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2008).

11. Horseshoes in Multidimensional Scaling and Local Kernel Methods
    With Persi Diaconis and Susan Holmes
    Annals of Applied Statistics, Vol. 2, No. 3, 2008, 777-807.

12. Analysis of Top to Bottom-k Shuffles
    Annals of Applied Probability, Vol. 16, No. 1, 2006, 30-55.

13. Mixing Time Bounds via the Spectral Profile
    With Ravi Montenegro and Prasad Tetali
    Electronic Journal of Probability, Vol. 11, 2006, 1-26.

14. Modified Logarithmic Sobolev Inequalities for Some Models of Random Walk
    Stochastic Processes and Their Applications, Vol. 114, 2004, 51-79.