My scholarship is in the field of Network Science. I study models for complex interactions, including generating data efficiently, analyzing dynamics and algorithms, and creating models with more realistic features. In our recent paper we define a new measure of nested structure and motivate its study in networks. The nested structure is related to the idea of higher-order interactions – relationships among the data which go beyond pairwise interactions. These higher-order interactions have been a major theme in my scholarship since my PhD dissertation, yet they remain computationally difficult to generate and mathematically complicated to reason about. Continuing work studies how the nested structure impacts contagion dynamics.
My research is at the intersection of math and computer science. I love using computational tools to explore (and validate!) hypotheses.
Summer MAPs
I am planning on taking students during the 2025 summer MAP session.
If you have questions about my MAP or working on my research, please do not book an office hour appointment. Unfortunately, I have so many students interested in such a meeting that it’s not feasible to meet with you all. Instead, please come to the CS Department MAP Session on Thursday January 23! (4pm, Noyce 3821) If you can’t make it to that session (or you missed it), please read my about my research here. If you still have questions, please send me an email.
To apply, you must fill out two forms, both of which are due on Friday February 28 at noon
- The common application
- My lab survey
Publications
2024
- The simpliciality of higher-order networks. EPJ
2023
- Nonbacktracking spectral clustering of nonuniform hypergraphs. SIAM Journal on Mathematics of Data Science
2022
- Functional Ball Dropping: A superfast hypergraph generation scheme. IEEE Big Data
2021
- Modeling COVID-19 at small colleges. PLOS One
- Emergence of Hierarchy in Networked Endorsement Dynamics. PNAS
- Chase-escape with death on Trees. Annals of Probability
- On Large-Scale Dynamic Topic Modeling with Nonnegative CP Tensor Decomposition. Advances in Data Science
2019
- Centrality in Dynamic Competition Networks. Complex Networks
- Classes of Preferential Attachment and triangle Preferential Attachment models with Power-law Spectra. The Journal of Complex Networks
- Coin-flipping, Ball-dropping, and Grass-hopping for Generating Random Graphs from Matrices of Edge Probabilities. SIAM Review
2018
- The HyperKron Graph Model for higher-order features.
IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), 2018. Link - Development of CNNs for feature extraction.
Algorithms for Synthetic Aperture Radar Imagery, International Society for Optics and Photonics. Link - Dynamic Competition Networks: detecting alliances and leaders.
Algorithms and Models for the Web Graph. Link
2017
- Revisiting Power-law Distributions in Spectra of Real World Networks.
Proceedings of the 23rd ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD ’17). Link - Measurement of the Energy-Dependent Angular Response of the ARES Detector System and Application to Aerial Imaging. IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science. Link
Press
- December 2021: 10 teams win funding for Scialog projects
- May 2021: A commentary on our recent PNAS paper on hierarchy
- October 2020: An interview with NPR on COVID-19 at small colleges.
- August 2020: This article from Inside HigherEd contains an interview with my colleague on modeling COVID-19 at small colleges. Link
- August 2020: Interview on modeling COVID-19 at small colleges. Link
- August 2019: Some quotes from my experience at the AMS MRC
