Jon Kleinberg, Ph.D.

Jon Kleinberg is noted for his creativity, intellectual ability, research scholarship, diverse research interests and the impact of his work. He is best known for his contributions in establishing the computational foundations for information retrieval and social networks. His information retrieval work includes the use of link analysis (e.g., hubs and authorities) for ranking, classifying and identifying web communities, the web as a graph and understanding the success of latent semantic analysis. His work in algorithmic social networks (a field that he can be said to have started) includes the understanding of “small worlds” and decentralized search, analysis of bursty streams and influence spread in social networks. Kleinberg has done work in many other fields, including approximation algorithms, communications networks, queuing theory, clustering, computational geometry, bioinformatics, temporal analysis of data streams, algorithmic game theory, online algorithms and distributed computing. His influence is augmented by popular papers in Science and Nature and by two widely used texts, one with Éva Tardos, Algorithm Design, and one with David Easley, Networks, Crowds and Markets: Reasoning about a Highly Connected World.