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Fil Menczer

I am a Professor of Informatics and Computer Science and the 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 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 science, social media, social networks, social computing, Web search and data mining, distributed and intelligent Web applications, and modeling of complex information networks.

My calendar is a bit crowded. You may schedule an appointment with Tara Holbrook, our center’s administrative assistant. Or you can try your luck by Doodle MeetMe, email, phone (+1-812-856-1377), fax (+1-812-855-0600), or in person (Informatics East room 314).

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

Latest News from the Blog

Network Science is a new journal for a new discipline — one using the network paradigm, focusing on actors and relational linkages, to inform research, methodology, and applications from many fields across the natural, social, engineering and informational sciences. Given growing understanding of the interconnectedness and globalization of the world, network methods are an increasingly recognized way to research aspects of modern society along with the individuals, organizations, and other actors within it. The editorial team includes several IU colleagues. Network Science is published by Cambridge University Press. For further details, visit the official website or the informal site here at IU.

Ruby

Emilio

We welcome two postdoctoral associates who just joined our center. Ruby Wang got her PhD in Physics from Central China Normal University in 2009. Emilio Ferrara got his PhD in Mathematics (Computer Science) from the University of Messina in Italy in 2012. Both will work on projects related to the diffusion of information in social media and social networks.

Congratulations to Karissa McKelvey for being one of six undergraduate students at Indiana University Bloomington who have received the 2011-12 Provost’s Award for Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity. A senior in the School of Informatics and Computing from Santa Rosa, Calif., Karissa is working with Filippo Menczer on the Truthy project, which analyzes and makes accessible a massive stream of data disseminated through social media. She is focusing on the design and development of an interactive Web interface to visualize and navigate the diffusion of memes on networks such as Twitter. The goal of the project is to empower researchers, journalists and ordinary citizens to visualize how information spreads online and identify critical factors of the diffusion process. Karissa recently presented her work at the 2012 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. She plans to pursue a Ph.D. and to conduct research that applies computational tools to fields such as political science.

Lilian

In our paper on Competition among memes in a world with limited attention in Nature Scientific Reports, Lilian Weng and coauthors Sandro Flammini, Alex Vespignani, and Fil Menczer report that we can explain the massive heterogeneity in the popularity and persistence of memes as deriving from a combination of the competition for our limited attention and the structure of the social network, without the need to assume different intrinsic values among ideas. The findings have been mentioned in the popular press, including Information Week, The Atlantic, and the Dutch daily NRC.

Prof. Flammini (PI) and Menczer have been awarded a three-year, $2M grant from DARPA in the context of the Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program, whose primary goal is “to develop a new science of social networks built on an emerging technology base,” Our IU unit leads a three-group team that includes collaborators at Lockheed-Martin Advanced Technology Lab and the University of Michigan. The funded project is aimed at designing and implementing a system to detect online persuasion campaigns.