Who I am:
I currently work as a quantitative analyst at Google in Mountain View, CA. I live in San Francisco.
During 2006-2008 I was a postdoc at Cornell University and a member of an interdisciplinary team supported by NSF to do pilot research and design infrastructure in order to make large semi-structured databases (such as the Internet Archive) accessible to social scientists. I have been very fortunate to have Jon Kleinberg, Michael Macy, Dan Cosley and Ted Welser among my colleagues and collaborators.
I received my Ph.D. from Columbia in 2006, where my advisor was Duncan J. Watts. Prior to that I studied physics and worked in IT in Russia, and also studied sociology in Warsaw, Poland.
I am Russian and my name is pronounced with hard G's (as in "Google", NOT like "Georgie").
Research:
I have done empirical studies on evolution of social networks, efficiency of communication networks in organizations, user participation in online communities (such as Wikipedia), and impact of missing data in analyses of social networks. I am interested in a variety of subjects, including social psychology and human-computer interaction, but generally people tend to think of me as an expert on social networks, online communities and data analysis.
I have served as a program committee member for ICWSM 2009, WWW 2008 and WWW 2009 (Social Networks and Web 2.0 track), SIGCOMM 2008 (Workshop on Online Social Networks), and KDD 2008 (Workshop on Social Network Mining and Analysis), and as a reviewer for NSF, American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Communication Yearbook, Complexity, Management Science, Physical Review E, Rationality & Society, Science, Social Forces, Social Networks, and Sociological Methodology.
In Spring 2008 I taught a course about methods for studying complex networks
in the Department of Information Science at Cornell.
Publications:
- C. Danescu Niculescu-Mizil, G. Kossinets, J. Kleinberg, L. Lee. How opinions are received by online communities: A case study on Amazon.com helpfulness votes. WWW 2009.
- G. Kossinets and D. J. Watts. Origins of homophiiy in an evolving social network. American Journal of Sociology, September 2009 (to appear).
- G. Kossinets, J. Kleinberg, D. Watts.
The Structure of Information Pathways in
a Social Communication Network. Proc. 14th ACM SIGKDD Intl. Conf. on
Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 2008. [I couldn't attend but Jon gave a fabulous talk, as always: Jon's talk at KDD]
- G. Kossinets and D. J. Watts. Empirical analysis of an evolving social network. Science 311, 88-90, 2006.
- G. Kossinets. Effects of missing data in social networks. Social Networks 28, 247-268, 2006.
Some software:
I once wrote a parser for Wikipedia historical database dumps (in Perl) which computes and extracts various useful metadata.
