Fil

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I am an Associate Professor of Informatics and Computer Science and the Associate Director of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research at the Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing. I also have courtesy appointments in Cognitive Science and Physics, and am affiliated with the Center for Data and Search Informatics, the Center for Security Informatics, and the Biocomplexity Institute. Finally I am the Lagrange Senior Fellow at the ISI Foundation’s Complex Networks Lab in Torino, Italy.  Research in my group, NaN, focuses on Web search and data mining, social Web applications, distributed and intelligent Web information systems, and modeling of complex information networks.

The best way to see me is to schedule an appointment with Michele Dompke, my administrative assistant. Or you can try your luck by email, phone (+1-812-856-1377), fax (+1-812-856-4764), or in person (Informatics East room 226).

Prospective students interested in joining NaN should look at this and this and this before contacting me. Then, if still interested, they should apply to one of our PhD programs: Informatics or Computer Science, Cognitive Science, or Biocomplexity. I am unable to respond to inquiries from prospective students unless they have already been admitted to one of these programs.

Latest News from the Blog

Fil will present the paper Folks in folksonomies: Social link prediction from shared metadata (authored with Rossano Schifanella, Alain Barrat, Ciro Cattuto, and Ben Markines) at WSDM 2010 in New York on February 5. The paper discusses homophily, or more specifically the relationship between social connections and social tagging in folksonomies. We show that social similarity measures based on annotations can be effective predictors of friendship relationships. For the occasion, we are making our Last.fm dataset publicly available.

Dr. Ruj

Congratulations to Ruj — er, Dr. Akavipat who successfully defended his dissertations on reputation systems for peer search networks, earning his PhD!

Impact metrics based on user queries

CNetS graduate student Diep Thi Hoang and associate director Filippo Menczer have developed a tool (called Scholarometer, previously Tenurometer in beta version) for evaluating the impact of scholars in their field. Scholarometer uses the h-index, which combines the scholarly output with the influence of the work, but adds the universal h-index proposed by Radicchi et al. to compare the impact of research in different disciplines. This is enabled by a social mechanism in which users of the tool collaborate to tag the disciplines of the scholars. “We have computer scientists, physicists, social scientists, people from many different backgrounds, who publish in lots of different areas,” says Menczer. However, the various communities have different citation methods and different publishing traditions, making it difficult to compare the influence of a sociologist and a computer scientist, for example. The universal h-index controls for differences in the publishing traditions, as well as the amount of research scholars in various fields have to produce to make an impact. Menczer is especially excited about the potential to help show how the disciplines are merging into one another. More from Inside Higher Ed… (Also picked up by ACM TechNews and CACM.)

The November 2009 issue of CACM published my letter to the editor entitled Abolish Conference Proceedings (Digital Edition). Here is the published text (which was edited for brevity from my longer letter).

As program chair of an ACM conference (Hypertext 2009), I agree with both Lance Fortnow’s Viewpoint “Time for Computer Science to Grow Up” (Aug. 2009) and Moshe Vardi’s Editor’s Letter “Conferences vs. Journals in Computing Research” (May 2009). Moreover, as an interdisciplinary researcher, I experience firsthand how conference-driven publication practices hurt CS in terms of potential interdisciplinary collaboration, reach, and visibility.

That’s why I propose the abolition of conference proceedings altogether. Submissions should instead go to journals, which would receive more and better ones, with refereeing resources shifting naturally from conferences to journals. As a result, journals would improve their quality and speed up their processes. With the CS community’s full attention, the review process would be more rigorous and timely. Deadlines would no longer be so concentrated, and scientists would submit better work, revise as needed, and profit immediately from reviewer feedback; the same referee would judge improvements to a particular submission.

In many cases where conferences and journals are aligned, presentations could be invited from among the best papers published in the previous year. For newer areas and groundbreaking work, a conference or workshop could still accept submissions but would not publish proceedings. Publishing would be the job of journals.

ACM should shepherd such a transition as publisher of both the proceedings of most top computing conferences and of many top computing journals.

After writing my letter to the editor, it was brought to my attention that there already exists a model for the approach I proposed, envisioned by the VLDB Endowment as a transition from the VLDB conference proceedings to the PVLDB journal and ultimately to a Journal of Data Management Research.

Channel 13 video

A report on the popularity of Twitter at IU (which ranks among the top 10 universities on a number of metrics) has sparked some interest in the local media about work CNetS researchers are going on Twitter usage. An interview with Filippo Menczer, associate director of CNetS, appeared on the front page of the Herald-Times on Oct 16, 2009. Indianapolis NBC affiliate Channel 13 interviewed Menczer and CNetS postdoc Bruno Gonçalves for their news program that night. The story was also picked up by the Chicago Tribune, US News & World Report, The Republic, Indianapolis Star, NewsDay, Courier-Journal, Indianapolis Business Journal, News-Sentinel, WIBC, The Indy Channel, WHAS, Journal & Courier, Palladium-Item, Star Press, and IDS.