Filippo Menczer

Filippo Menczer
Fields	Cognitive science Computer science Physics
Institutions	Indiana University Bloomington
Alma mater	Sapienza University of Rome
Website cnets.indiana.edu/fil/

Filippo Menczer is an American and Italian professor of informatics and computer science who is the director at the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, a research unit of the Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing and a member lab of the Web Science Trust Network. He holds courtesy appointments in Cognitive Science and Physics and is a fellow of the Institute for Scientific Interchange in Turin, Italy. As of November 20, 2013 he was named a Distinguished Scientist of the ACM and a senior research fellow of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction.

Education, career, service

Menczer holds a Laurea in physics from the Sapienza University of Rome and a PhD in computer science and cognitive science from the University of California, San Diego. He previously was an assistant professor of management sciences at the University of Iowa, and a fellow-at-large of the Santa Fe Institute. At Indiana University Bloomington since 2003, he served as division chair in the Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing in 2009-2011. Menczer has been the recipient of Fulbright, Rotary Foundation, and NATO fellowships, and a Career Award from the National Science Foundation. He holds editorial positions for the journals EPJ Data Science and Network Science. He has served as program or track chair for various conferences including the International World Wide Web Conference and the International ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media. He is general chair of the ACM Web Science 2014 Conference.

Research

Menczer's research focuses on Web science, social networks, social media, social computation, Web mining, data science, distributed and intelligent Web applications, and modeling of complex information networks. He introduced the idea of topical and adaptive Web crawlers, a specialized and intelligent type of Web crawler.

Menczer is also known for his work on social phishing, a type of phishing attacks that leverage friendship information from social networks, yielding over 70% success rate in experiments (with Markus Jakobsson); semantic similarity measures for information and social networks; models of complex information and social networks (with Alessandro Vespignani and others); search engine censorship; and search engine bias.

Recently Menczer's group has focused on analysis and modeling of how memes and misinformation spread through social media in domains such as the Occupy movement and political elections, and how to combat astroturfing and detect social bots. Menczer and colleagues have also advanced the understanding of information virality, and in particular the effect of the competition for our finite attention and the prediction of what memes will go viral based on the structure of early diffusion networks.

Projects

• truthy.indiana.edu: a research project that helps you understand and visualize how information spreads on Twitter. Includes API and Bot or Not demo.
• Scholarometer: a social bibliometrics tool to facilitate citation analysis and help evaluate the impact of an author's publications. By crowdsourcing discipline annotations, this browser extension is able to provide a universal metric to compare impact across disciplines.
• GiveALink.org: an early social tagging system for research
• Kinsey Reporter: a global mobile survey platform to share, explore, and visualize anonymous data about sex. Developed in collaboration with the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. Reports are submitted via smartphone, then explored on this website or downloaded for off-line analysis via a free API.
• Other research projects are listed on the Networks & agents Network (NaN) website.

External links

• Official website