Jon Kleinberg

Digital Library

ACM AAAI Allen Newell Award

USA - 2014

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For groundbreaking work in computer science in areas including social and information networks, information retrieval, and data science, and for bridging computing, economics and the social sciences.

Kleinberg's work is noted for its diversity, creativity, scholarship and brilliance. He has contributed in deeply significant ways to our understanding of information networks and the people who use them, recognizing that one cannot fully understand the former without studying the latter. This has included the understanding of hubs and authorities in the hyperlinked structure of the World Wide Web, path discovery in small world networks, and influence spread (contagion) in networks. His masterful book (joint with the economist David Easley) Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning about a Highly Connected World won the Lanchester Prize in 2011 for the best contribution to operations research and the management sciences published in English in the previous three years. His work on the bursty behavior of temporal data streams has also been highly influential, and he has contributed important results across a wide variety of additional areas, including algorithmic graph theory, clustering, high-dimensional algorithmic geometry, game theory, approximation algorithms, queuing theory, social choice and computational biology. Kleinberg's work effectively combines both theory and experiment, with far-reaching impacts on everyday activities such as web search, while embodying and foreshadowing a convergence between computing and the social sciences.
Press Release

ACM Fellows

USA - 2013

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For contributions to the science of information and social networks.

ACM Prize in Computing

USA - 2008

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For his contributions to the science of networks and the World Wide Web. His work is a deep combination of social insights and mathematical reasoning.

Jon Kleinberg's work on the use of link analysis led to the design of vastly improved algorithms for Web search. His connection between network structure and information was a fundamental breakthrough that has transformed the way that information is retrieved on the Web. His work on the small world phenomenon provides deep insight into the structure of networks and helps explain the social phenomenon of "six degrees of separation."