Press Releases

Third Annual WIN Conference at NYU Stern

Third Annual WIN Conference at NYU Stern Explores Value of Networking Technologies and Data for Medicine, the Military, Marketing and More on September 30-October 1, 2011
NEW YORK--Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare play significant roles in building and shaping online communities and social networks. But what about the information derived from these “information networks?” How useful is this data in identifying and solving important socioeconomic, business, political and medical issues?

Leading academics and experts from various disciplines will convene to answer these questions, present new ideas and discuss the value of information from networks at the third annual Workshop on Information in Networks (WIN) Conference at NYU Stern.

“Networks and new networked data can explain phenomena that we couldn’t even study before,” said Sinan Aral, Stern professor and co-organizer of the WIN Conference. “This conference brings together leading researchers to examine the distribution, diffusion, value and influence of information in networks on social and economic outcomes.”

Speakers include:

Laszlo Barabasi, a Distinguished University Professor at Northeastern University and Director, Center for Complex Network Research. Author of Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do, and Linked: The New Science of Networks. Barabasi’s work led to the discovery of scale-free networks in 1999, and he proposed the Barabasi-Albert model to explain their widespread emergence in natural, technological and social systems, from the cellular telephone to the WWW.

Nicholas Christakis, a professor at Harvard University with appointments in the departments of Health Care Policy, Sociology and Medicine. Trained both as a physician and social scientist, his research has, for more than a decade, focused on how social networks form and operate. His book, Connected, co-authored with James H. Fowler, has been translated into nearly 20 languages. In 2009, Christakis was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine, and to Foreign Policy’s list of 100 top global thinkers.

Duncan Watts, often credited with co-birthing modern network science, is one of the most influential young scientists to address social networks and is the author of Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age and the newly released Everything is Obvious – Once You Know the Answer.

This year’s conference is hosted by three NYU Stern Information Systems professors:

Sinan Aral (@sinanaral), who studies social contagion and how information diffusion in massive social networks such as Twitter and Facebook affects information worker productivity, consumer demand and health.

Foster Provost, who studies statistical data mining and predictive modeling with networked data.

Arun Sundararajan, who studies the economics of networks, how information technology alters interpersonal interaction and the formation of social structures, how local (network) effects are mediated by underlying social networks, and the diffusion of information and economic influence in online networks.

These professors, along with their Stern Information Systems colleagues, have pioneered studying networked data in business and economics, a theme of the group’s research for more than five years. Integrating ideas from economics, game theory, information retrieval, machine learning, sociology, and statistics, their research focus is on how complex social networks and the information in them change business outcomes.

Where: NYU Stern School of Business
44 West Fourth St., Room 5-50
New York, NY

When: Friday, September 30 and Saturday, October 1, 2011
7:30-8:30 Breakfast
8:30 Program begins

For complete conference details visit www.winworkshop.net or on Twitter at @WINWorkshop. Media RSVPs contact Rika Nazem, NYU Stern, rnazem@stern.nyu.edu.

Contacts

NYU Stern
Rika Nazem, 212-998-0678
rnazem@stern.nyu.edu