danah boyd, Senior Researcher
danah boyd's research centers on the intersection of people, social practices, and technology. She is interested in how mediated environments alter the structural conditions in which people operate and how people navigate and repurpose these environments for their own needs. Her current work investigates how youth culture, privacy, online safety, and unintended outcomes of social technologies. danah is also a Research Scholar at New York University's Media, Culture, and Communication program, a Visiting Researcher at Harvard Law School, and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales. When bored or frustrated, danah is known to blow off steam by ranting on her blog. Read more...

Luong Hoang, Research Software Design Engineer (RSDE) II

Luong (Louie) received a B.S. in Mathematics, Computer Science and Quantitative Economics from Drake University in 2008. He was named the Outstanding Student in Mathematics and is a recipient of the Best Undergraduate Research Paper award at MICS 07 conference. After graduation he joined Microsoft on the Dynamics AX team, helping to build kernel window controls for application developers. He is currently also a graduate student at MIT studying Computer Science with a specific focus on Computational Mathematics and Algorithms. His present interest lies in methods and analysis of Parallel/Super Computing.

Sham Kakade, Senior Researcher

Sham Kakade was previously an associate professor of statistics at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and an assistant professor at the Toyota Technological Institute. He received his B.A. from the California Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. from the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit affiliated with University College London. He was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania, with Michael Kearns. His research focuses on artificial intelligence and machine learning, and their connections to other areas such as game theory and economics. Read more...

Adam Tauman Kalai, Senior Researcher

Adam was previously an assistant professor of computer science at Georgia Tech and TTI-Chicago. He received a PhD at CMU from the ingenious Avrim Blum, followed by an NSF post-doc at MIT under the wise guidance of Santosh Vempala. His main research interests are machine learning and crowdsourcing. Read more... 

Ce Liu, Researcher
Ce Liu just joined MSRNE as a postdoc researcher right after he obtained his PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received the BS degree in automation and the ME degree in pattern recognition from the Department of Automation, Tsinghua University in 1999 and 2002, respectively. From 2002 to 2003, he worked at Microsoft Research Asia as an assistant researcher. His research interests include computer vision, computer graphics, and machine learning. He has published more than 20 papers in the top conferences and journals in these fields. He received a Microsoft Fellowship in 2005, the outstanding student paper award at the Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) in 2006, a Xerox Fellowship in 2007, the best student paper award at IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) in 2009. Read more...

Markus Mobius, Senior Researcher

Markus Mobius was formerly an Associate Professor of economics at Harvard University and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His main research interests lie in social networks, with a particular focus on cooperation and trust in social networks. He does both theoretical and experimental research (mainly field experiments). Markus received his PhD from MIT in 2000 and previously earned an M.Phil in economics and a B.A. in mathematics from Oxford University. He and his wife Tanya Rosenblat have two daughters. Read more... 

Madhu Sudan, Principal Researcher

Madhu Sudan got his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1992, and joined MSR in May 2009 after stints in IBM Research (1992-1997) and MIT (1997-2009) where he was the Fujitsu Professor of EECS and Associate Director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Madhu Sudan's research lies in the fields of computational complexity theory, algorithms and coding theory. He is best known for his works on probabilistic checking of proofs, and on the design of list-decoding algorithms for error-correcting codes. His current research interests include semantic communication and property testing. In 2002, Madhu Sudan was awarded the Nevanlinna Prize, for outstanding contributions to the mathematics of computer science, at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Beijing. Read more...

Mike Ananny, Second-Year Post-Doc

Mike Ananny (Stanford University Department of Communication PhD) is a first-year Postdoctoral researcher and a Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. He studies the social construction and use of information systems, focusing on practices and technologies of networked news production. He is currently investigating how press autonomy and the “freedom to listen” appear in the design and use of news organizations’ APIs. Ananny holds a Bachelors in Computer Science & Human Biology from the University of Toronto, a Masters in Science from the MIT Media Laboratory, and has held fellowships with the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, Stanford University’s Center on Philanthropy & Civil Society, the LEGO Corporation, and Interval Research. He was a founding member of the research staff at Media Lab Europe and has worked with LEGO, Mattel and Nortel Networks helping to translate research concepts and prototypes into new products and services. Read more...

Ivan Corwin, First-Year Post Doc

Ivan Corwin was previously a Ph.D. student at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at NYU, under the supervision of Gerard Ben Arous. He joins the lab as the first Oded Schramm Memorial Fellow and is also affiliated with MIT. His main research interests are in probability, mathematical physics and statistical physics. In particular he is interested in understanding universal properties of complex disordered systems in their large scale / time limits. Such systems include interfacial growth processes, interacting particle systems, large queuing systems, certain types of constrained optimization problems and stochastic partial differential equations. Read more...

Dana Dachman-Soled, First-Year Post-Doc

Dana Dachman-Soled received her PhD in Computer Science at Columbia University under the supervision of Tal Malkin. Her research interests include the theoretical foundations of cryptography, property testing of Boolean functions and cryptographic hardness of learning. In particular, she is interested in exploring complexity-theoretic approaches to cryptography.

Matt Elliott, First-Year Post-Doc

Matt completed his PhD in Economics at Stanford in 2011 under the supervision of Matt Jackson, Muriel Niederle and Bob Hall. He previously earned an MPhil in economics from Oxford University. Matt is an economic theorist with particular interests in network, matching and contract theory. He will be starting as an assistant professor of economics at Caltech in Fall 2012. Read more...

Daniel Hsu, First Year Post-Doc

Daniel Hsu received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2010 from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego, where he was advised by Sanjoy Dasgupta. In 2010-2011, he was a postdoc with the Department of Statistics at Rutgers University and the Department of Statistics at the University of Pennsylvania, supervised by Tong Zhang and Sham M. Kakade. His research interests are in algorithmic statistics and machine learning. Read more...

Brendan Lucier, First-Year Post-Doc

Brendan Lucier was a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Toronto under the supervision of Allan Borodin and Mike Molloy. His research interests lie in theoretical computer science and game theory. He is particularly interested in algorithmic mechanism design and the theory of social networks. Read more...

Aleksander Madry, First-Year Post Doc

Aleksander received his PhD in Computer Science at MIT under supervision of Michel Goemans and Jonathan Kelner. His research focuses on algorithmic graph theory, i.e. design and analysis of very efficient (approximation) algorithms for fundamental graph problems. He also enjoys investigating topics in combinatorial optimization - especially the ones involving dealing with uncertainty. He is a recipient of the Best Paper Award at SODA 2010 and STOC 2011.  Read more...

Alice Marwick, Second-Year Post-Doc

Alice Marwick recently received her PhD in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University, where she was advised by Marita Sturken and Helen Nissenbaum. She is interested in the intersections of social media, identity, and consumer culture; her dissertation explored how people use social media to boost their social status, specifically the self-presentation strategies of micro-celebrity, life-streaming, and self-branding. Read more...

Andrés Monroy-Hernández, First-Year Post-Doc with FUSE Labs

Ohad Shamir, Second-Year Post-Doc

Ohad Shamir was previously a Ph.D. student at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, under the supervision of Prof. Naftali Tishby. His main research interests are in machine learning and its intersection with related fields. He is particularly interested in using theoretical insights to develop practical new algorithms, for important but hard settings which defy standard techniques. His work in the past included topics such as online learning, statistical learning theory, clustering, learning with missing information and learning from crowdsourced data. Read more...

David Steurer, Second-Year Post-Doc

David Steurer was a Ph.D. student at Princeton University, advised by Sanjeev Arora. His research area is theoretical computer science, in particular, algorithms and complexity theory. Currently, he is interested in the complexity of approximating basic combinatorial optimization problems, especially graph expansion and unique games. Read more...

Oznur Tastan, Second-Year Post-Doc

Oznur was previously a PhD student in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University under supervision of Profs Jaime Carbonell and Judith Klein-Seetharaman. Oznur received her BSc in Biological Sciences at Sabanci University. Her current research interests are in computational biology and machine learning; particularly problems in cancer systems biology. Read more...

Alexander Wolitzky, First-Year Post-Doc

Alexander Wolitzky received a PhD in economics from MIT in 2011. His research is in game theory and economic theory, particularly dynamic games and applications of game theory in industrial organization and political economy. He will be joining the Stanford Department of Economics in 2012. Read more...

Susan Athey, Professor of Economics, Harvard University
Susan Athey is a professor of economics at Harvard University. She previously taught at MIT and Stanford, and she received her PhD from the Stanford GSB in 1995. During 2008, she took leave from Harvard to work full time at Microsoft, serving as Chief Economist, and she continues to serve in that role as a consultant. The focus of both her recent research and her consulting at Microsoft is online advertising. Her broader research interests include auctions and the design of markets, the economics of the news media, dynamic games and contracts with hidden information, industrial organization, econometric identification, and organizational design. She received the John Bates Clark Medal in 2007 and became a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008. She recently served as an elected member of the Council of the Econometric Society as well as the Executive Committee of the American Economic Association. She has three young children, and her husband, Guido Imbens, is also an economics professor at Harvard. Read more...

Eli Ben-Sasson, Technion

Eli Ben-Sasson is an associate professor of computer science at Technion, Israel. His research is within theoretical computer science with recent focus on the generation and verification of automated proofs, the analysis of locally testable error correcting codes and the study of randomness arising from algebraically simple sources.  Read more...

Irit Dinur, Weizmann

Irit Dinur received her Ph.D in 2001 from Tel-Aviv University. Following a postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study, NEC, and at the Miller Institute in Berkeley California she joined the faculty of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 2007 She became an associate professor at the Weizmann Institute. Irit is interested in theoretical computer science, and in combinatorics. In particular she is interested in probabilistically checkable proofs, hardness of approximation, and robustness of computation. Read more...

David Gamarnik, Sloan/MIT

David Gamarnik is an associate professor of operations research at the Sloan School of Management of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received B.A. in mathematics from New York

University in 1993 and Ph.D. in Operations Research from MIT in 1998. Since then he worked in the Department of Mathematical Sciences, IBM Research, before joining MIT in 2005. His research interests include applied probability and stochastic processes, theory of random graphs and algorithms, combinatorial optimization, statistical learning theory and various applications. He is a recipient of the Erlang Prize and Best Publication Award for 2011, both from the INFORMS Applied Probability Society. He is also a recipient of the IBM Faculty Partnership Award and several NSF sponsored grants. He is an area editor of Operations Research journal and associate editor of the Annals of Applied Probability, Mathematics of Operations Research, Stochastic Systems, and Queueing Systems journals. Read more...

David Kempe, USC

David Kempe received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 2003, and is an Associate Professor for Computer Science at the University of Southern California.

His research interests lie broadly in algorithms, and more specifically in Algorithmic Game Theory, Social Networks, and questions related to feature selection. Read more...

Nageeb Ali, University of California, San Diego (UCSD)

Nageeb Ali is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) where he has worked since completing his Ph.D. in Economics at Stanford in 2007 under the supervision of Susan Athey and Doug Bernheim. His work is in economic theory with particular focus on questions in social networks, political economy, multilateral bargaining, and behavioral economics. His current work studies the role that social networks play in sustaining cooperation in communities. Read more...  

Alessandro Bonatti, MIT Sloan

Alessandro Bonatti received his Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University, under the supervision of Dirk Bergemann. He currently is an Assistant Professor of Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His research focuses on the dynamics of incentives and contracts and on the economics of information. More recently, he is interested in the allocative and revenue effects of the recent advances in the online advertising technology. Read more...

Amitabh Chandra, Harvard Kennedy School of Government

Amitabh Chandra is an economist and a Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He is a Research Associate at the IZA Institute in Bonn, Germany and at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). He also serves as a Special Commissioner on Provider Price Reform. His research focuses on productivity and cost-growth in healthcare and racial disparities in healthcare. His research has been supported by the National Institute of Aging, the National Institute of Child Health and Development, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and has been published in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the New England Journal of Medicine, and Health Affairs. He is an editor of the Journal of Human Resources, Economics Letters, and the American Economic Journal. Professor Chandra has testified to the United States Senate, the National Academy of Science, the Institute of Medicine and the United States Commission on Civil Rights. His research has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, Newsweek, and on National Public Radio. He is the recipient of an Outstanding Teacher Award, the first-prize recipient of the Upjohn Institute's International Dissertation Research Award, the Kenneth Arrow Award for best paper in health economics, and the Eugene Garfield Award for the impact of medical research. Read more...

Michal Feldman, Hebrew University/Harvard

Michal Feldman received her Ph.D in 2005 from the University of California at Berkeley. Following a postdoc at the Hebrew University and at Tel-Aviv University, she joined the faculty of the School of Business Administration at the Hebrew University (in 2007). Her research focuses on the intersection of game theory, computer science and microeconomics, a field often termed "Algorithmic Game Theory". She has been recently awarded a Marie Curie grant, and is currently a visiting scholar at the Center for Research on Computation and Society (CRCS) at Harvard University. Read more...

Ernest Fraenkel, MIT

Ernest Fraenkel studied Chemistry and Physics as an undergraduate at Harvard College and obtained his Ph.D. in Structural Biology at MIT in the department of Biology. After doing post-doctoral work in the same field at Harvard, he turned his attention to the emerging field of Systems Biology. His research now focuses on using high-throughput techniques and computational methods to uncover the molecular pathways that are altered in disease and to identify new therapeutic strategies. Read more...

Bill Freeman, MIT

Bill Freeman is a professor in the EECS Department at MIT, directing a computer vision research group in CSAIL. He is interested in novel camera designs (computational photography) and in topics at the intersections of computer vision, computer graphics, and machine learning. Questions of interest include how to characterize and represent images and image sequences, how to sample signals, and how to re-render videos to reveal otherwise unseen signals of interest. In 2010, he was an Associate Director of CSAIL.  Read more...

Rob Miller, MIT

Rob Miller is an associate professor of computer science at MIT CSAIL. He earned his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University (2002), and has won an ACM Distinguished Dissertation honorable mention, NSF CAREER award, and six best paper awards at UIST and USENIX. His research interests lie at the intersection of programming and human computer interaction: making programming easier for end-users (web end-user programming), making it more productive for professionals (HCI for software developers), and making humans part of the programming system itself (crowd computing and human computation). Read more... 

Jed Brubaker, UC Irvine

Jed Brubaker is a PhD candidate in Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California - Irvine. His research interests include digital identity, social media, and practices of representation in data. Recently this has focused on studies of death on social network sites, the relationship between infrastructure and self-presentation, and "single-use" identities on sites like craigslist Missed Connections. This work draws from CSCW, HCI, psychology, science and technology studies, and critical theory. At UC Irvine, Jed is part of the Laboratory for Ubiquitous Computing and Interaction (LUCI) and the STAR research group. He previously earned his M.A. at Georgetown University in Communication, Culture and Technology, and his B.S. at the University of Utah in Psychology.

Balu Sivan, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Balu Sivan is a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he is advised by Shuchi Chawla. His research interests are in algorithmic game theory and mechanism design, stochastic analysis of online algorithms motivated by computational advertising. He picked up interest in the latter while working with MSR Redmond folks in 2010.

Vasilis Syrgkanis, Cornell

Vasilis Syrgkanis is a PhD student at Cornell where he is advised by Eva Tardos. His research interests are in algorithmic game theory and more specifically in the analysis of efficiency of game theoretic settings that arise in online markets. In the previous summer he was an intern at the MSR Lab in Cambridge UK.  

Moshe Tennenholtz, Principal Researcher

Moshe is a principal researcher with Microsoft Research and a full professor at the Technion—Israel Institute of Technology, where he is an incumbent of the Sondheimer Chair. Moshe founded the first pure research group at the Microsoft Israel R&D Center, focusing on e-commerce and game theory, now part of MSR-NE. Moshe pioneered several lines of research in the interplay between artificial intelligence and game theory along 20+ years of research. He was also a co-founder and chief scientist of companies in the area of e-commerce. Read more here...  

Noga Alon, Weekly Visitor from Tel Aviv University

Noga Alon is a Baumritter Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Tel Aviv University, Israel. He received his Ph. D. in Mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1983 and had visiting positions in various research institutes including MIT, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, IBM Almaden Research Center, Bell Laboratories, Bellcore and Microsoft Research. His research interests are mainly in Combinatorics, Graph Theory and their applications in Theoretical Computer Science. His main contributions include the study of expander graphs and their applications, the investigation of derandomization techniques, the foundation of streaming algorithms, the development and applications of algebraic and probabilistic methods in Discrete Mathematics and the study of problems in Information Theory, Social Choice, Combinatorial Geometry and Combinatorial Number Theory. He is a member of the Israel National Academy of Sciences and of the Academia Europaea, and received the Erdos Prize, the Feher Prize, the Polya Prize, the Bruno Memorial Award, the Landau Prize, the Goedel Prize, the Israel Prize and the EMET Prize.

Dvir Falik, Post-Doc

Dvir Falik finished his Ph.D. in computer science at the Hebrew university in 2011 under the supervision of Alex Samorodnitsky and Ehud Friedgut. His research interests lie in theoretical computer science and analytic methods in combinatorics, specifically with applications to social choice theory.

Uriel Feige, Weekly Visitor from Weizmann

Uriel Feige holds the Lawrence G. Horowitz Professorial Chair at the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics in the Weizmann Institute. His general area of interest is that of theory of computing. Most of his work concerns coping with NP-hard problems, and includes the design and analysis of approximation algorithms, rigorous analysis of heuristics, and the study of limitations of these approaches. He shared the Gödel award in 2001, for work on the PCP theorem and hardness of approximation.

Moran Feldman is a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science department at the Technion, under the supervision of Prof. Seffi Naor. He is broadly interested in the design and analysis of approximation and online algorithms. Recently, he has been working on approximating problems with submodular objective functions. He received a B.A. degree in Computer Science from the Israeli Open University in 2004, and a M.Sc. in 2008, from the same university, working on approximating minimum cost directed Steiner forests.

Gil Kalai, Weekly Visitor from Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Gil Kalai, is a Professor of mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and has a long term visiting position at Yale University. Kalai is a weekly visitor at the MSR subgroup in Isreal since 2008, and a devoted visitor/fan of the MSR groups in Seattle and New England since 1999.

Kalai's research areas are Combinatorics and Convexity. He is interested in the combinatorial theory of convex polytopes, relations of combinatorics with topology and with Fourier analysis, Boolean functions, and threshold and isoperimetric phenomena. He is interested in applications to theoretical computer science, mathematical programming, probability theory, game theory, and economics.

Kalai is the recipient of the 1992 Polya Prize, the 1993 Erdos Prize and the 1994 Fulkerson Prize. He was a cofounder of the center for theoretical computer science and discrete mathematics at the Hebrew University. He served in several scientific committees at the university, national and international levels, and he belongs to several editorial boards. In the last years he has been writing a scientific blog, and has been active in various Internet mathematical activities.

Kalai's blog: "Combinatorics and More" http://gilkalai.wordpress.com/
Kalai's home page http://www.ma.huji.ac.il/~kalai/ 

Ron Lavi, Weekly Visitor from Technion

Ron Lavi is a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management at the Technion. He has a Ph.D. in computer science from the Hebrew University, and has joined the Technion in 2006 after a two-year post-doc at the California Institute of Technology. His research focuses on topics on the border of computer science and economics, mainly in auction theory and algorithmic mechanism design. Two main conceptual themes of his research are: (1) searching for the possibility – impossibility border for robust mechanisms, and (2) alternative solution concepts in mechanism design. His research also reflects several application-oriented subjects, for example: (1) online auctions and dynamic mechanism design, (2) robust combinatorial auctions, and (3) truthful scheduling mechanisms. His works represent a successful integration of economic models with computer science analysis methods, and appear both in top economic journals as well as in the top CS conferences and journals. Read more... 

Reshef Meir, Intern, Hebrew University in Jerusalem

Reshef Meir is currently a PhD student in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, under the supervision of Prof. Jeffrey S. Rosenschein. His research is interdisciplinary in nature, focusing on algorithmic game theory and its relations with social choice theory, machine learning and cognitive science. He is mainly interested in the design and analysis of mechanisms that encourage self-interested agents to cooperate.