I am a Professor of Computer Science at the Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science (USC Viterbi), Communication (USC Annenberg), and Preventive Medicine (Keck School of Medicine of USC). I am also Research Team Leader at the University of Southern California‘s Information Sciences Institute, Principal Investigator of the Machine Intelligence and Data Science (MINDS) group, and Director of the Annenberg Networks Network (ANN) center.
My research core is Humans & Machines + Networks & Society and this is our team:
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| Emilio Ferrara PI |
Luca Luceri Research Scientist |
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| Alex Bisberg PhD (CS) |
Charles (Duke) Bickham PhD (CS) |
Herbert Chang PhD (Comm) |
Emily Chen PhD (CS) |
Bijean Ghafouri PhD (PolSci) |
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| Julie Jiang PhD (CS) |
Hsien-Te Kao PhD (CS) |
Alex Spangher PhD (CS) (co-advised by Prof Jon May) |
Yilei Zeng PhD (CS) |
Meiqing Zhang PhD (Comm) (co-advised by Prof Patti Riley) |
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| Eun Cheol Choi PhD (Comm) |
Current Undergraduate & Master Students:
 Nikhil Jindal |
 Liuliu Chen |
 Zihang Sky E |
 Siyi Zhou |
 Chiyu Wei |
 Weixing Nie |
Alumni Hall of Fame
Former Scientists & Postdocs
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| Goran Muric | Alessandro Bessi | Homa Hosseinmardi | Anna Sapienza | Gao Zhenxiang |
| Next: Principal Scientist, InferLink Corp. | Nextbit AI, Director AI R&D | University of Pennsylvania, Senior Research Scientist | Denmark Technical University, Research Scientist | University of Connecticut, Postdoc |
Former PhD Students
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| Adam Badawy | Ashok Deb | Palash Goyal | Akira Matsui | Karishma Sharma | Shen Yan |
| Next: Principal Data Scientist, Capital One | Senior Lecturer, West Point | Senior AI Research Manager, Samsung Research | Assistant Professor, Yokohama National University | Applied Scientist, Amazon | Research Scientist, Meta |
Former Undergrads and Master’s students
Samar HaiderNext: PhD at University of Pennsylvania |
 Weiwei Zheng Big Data Developer at Huawei |
 Divya Choudhary Senior Research Scientist at Samsung Research |
 Aditya Gupta Software Development Engineer II, Amazon |
 Dhruv Mathew Machine Learning Engineer, Applied Research at Quantiphi |
 Ankith Mohan Next: CS PhD student @ Virginia Tech |
 Vikram Mudaliar Software Engineer II at Amazon |
 Huy Tran Nghiem CS PhD student @ University of Maryland |
Jaimin Patel 👨💻 Founder & Builder – Caddi 👨💻 |
 Vandana Sreenivasa Rao Search @Salesforce |
 Yifei Crystal Chen Next: Data Scientist at Facebook |
My research falls at the intersection of these fields:
| Network Science | Data Science | Human-Computer Interaction | Computational Social Science |
Current Appointments
- Aug 2015 – present, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
- Professor of Communication (USC Annenberg) and Computer Science (USC Viterbi) (Office ANN 414A in the “new Annenberg” building)
- Research Team Leader at the USC’s Information Sciences Institute (Office #939 at ISI in Marina del Rey)
- Principal Investigator at the Machine Intelligence and Data Science research group
- Associate Director for Applied Data Science and Undergraduate Programs (USC Data Science Programs) [ends 6.30.2022]
Former Collaborators (students and postdocs)
- At USC:
- Summer 2020: Aparna Ananthasubramaniam (University of Michigan), Hui Sophie Huang (Northeastern University), Shawn Huesman (Northern Kentucky University), Prerna Juneja (Virginia Tech University), Danaja Maldeniya (University of Michigan), Weiwei Zheng (University of Chicago), Xinyi Zhou (Syracuse University)
- Fall 2019: Adam Badawy (PhD), Ashok Deb (Phd), Palash Goyal (PhD), Di Huang (PhD), Hsien-Te Kao (PhD), Akira Matsui (PhD), Goran Muric (Postdoc), Shen Yan (PhD), Yilei Zeng (PhD), MSc: Samar Haider; Undergrads: Xinyi Peng, Divya Suri, Qufei Wang, Yiyun Zhu, Tong (Sally) Zuo
- Summer 2019: Hanyu Chwe (PhD from Northeastern University), Boli Fang (PhD from Indiana University), Desheng Hu (PhD from Northeastern University), Leonardo Nizzoli (PhD from IIT & University of Pisa), Mark Heimann (PhD from University of Michigan), Mariam Nouh (PhD from Oxford University), Hao Peng (PhD from University of Michigan), Miley Yao (PhD from SUNY Albany); MSc @USC: Mohammad Zaiyan Alam , Deepali Bhola, Divya Choudhary, Ankita Goswami, Samar Haider, Zhixu Li, Xinyi Lin, Dhruv Mathew, Vikram Mudaliar, Huy Tran Nghiem, Divya Suri, Mingyue Tang
- Fall 2018/Spring 2019: Adam Badawy (PhD), Ashok Deb (Phd), Palash Goyal (PhD), Homa Hosseinmardi (Postdoc), Di Huang (PhD), Luca Luceri (PhD student from the University of Bern, Switzerland), Hsien-Te Kao (PhD), Akira Matsui (PhD), Goran Muric (Postdoc), Anna Sapienza (Postdoc), Shen Yan (PhD), Yilei Zeng (PhD), Gao Zhenxiang (Postdoc); Undergrads: Xinyi Peng, Divya Suri, Qufei Wang, Yiyun Zhu, Tong (Sally) Zuo
- Summer 2018: Aseel Addawood (PhD), Ritam Dutt (Undergrad), Mert Ozer (PhD), Zhenyu Qin (Undergrad), Raj Vaza (Undergrad), Zhao Wang (PhD)
- Fall 2017/Spring 2018: Adam Badawy (PhD), Ashok Deb (Phd), Palash Goyal (PhD), Homa Hosseinmardi (Postdoc), Di Huang (Visiting MSc), Hsien-Te Kao (PhD), Akira Matsui (PhD), Goran Muric (Postdoc), Anna Sapienza (Postdoc), Shen Yan (PhD), Yilei Zeng (PhD)
- Summer 2017: Sindhu Ernala (PhD), Sneha Kudugunta (PhD), Hao Peng (PhD), Iacopo Pozzana (PhD), Sree Priyanka Uppu (MSc)
- Fall 2016/Spring 2017: Adam Badawy (PhD), Alessandro Bessi (Visiting PhD), Prathmesh Gat (MSc), Palash Goyal (PhD), Margaret Martin (MSc), Simrat Singh Chhabra (MSc), Archit Srivastava (MSc), Sree Priyanka Uppu (MSc)
- Summer 2016: Laura Alessandretti (Visiting PhD), Adam Badawy (PhD), Prathmesh Gat (MSc), Chiranth Gopal (Visiting Undergrad Student), Margaret Martin (MSc)
- Fall 2015/Spring 2016: Vijayan Balasubramanian (MSc), Zeyu Dai (MSc), Zekun Li (MSc), Margaret Martin (MSc), Mahesh Tandarpally (MSc), Wenqiang Wang (MSc)
- At Indiana University: Onur Varol, Clayton A. Davis, Zeyao Yang, Lei Le, Jaehyuk Park, Qing Ke, Azadeh Nematzadeh, Prashant Shiralkar, Jasleen Kaur, Rachael Fulper, Pablo Moriano, Alex Barron, Mohsen Jafariasbagh, Michael D. Conover, Karissa McKelvey, Bryce Lewis, Kehontas Rowe
Research Resources
- The datasets adopted in my research on Social Networks are available on request.
- The WERW-Kpath algorithm to compute the Kpath Edge Centrality has been released.
- The CONCLUDE community detection algorithm has been released.
- The Python Data Scientist toolbox is a list of useful resources, tutorials, and libraries to proficiently use Python for Data Science.