Gueorgi Kossinets

Who I am

I work as a quantitative user experience researcher at Google in Mountain View, CA.

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  fortunate to have Jon Kleinberg, Lillian Lee, Michael Macy, and Dan Cosley among my collaborators.

I received a Ph.D. in Sociology from Columbia in 2006; 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 first name is pronounced with hard G's (as in "get"); the "u" is silent. It is more often spelled Georgi or Georgy.  The current standard form of my name (i.e. used in official Russian documents) would be Georgy Kosinets. The whimsical variant I enjoy is due to the Cyrillic-to-Latin transliteration rules that were in effect in the 1990s.


Research

I have studied mathematical properties of social networks, efficiency of communication in organizations, user participation in online communities (such as Wikipedia), and impact of missing data in analyses of social networks.   I'm a "breadth-first" guy, and my interests range from social psychology to human-computer interaction and data visualization; though generally people think of me as an expert on social networks, online communities and data analysis methods.

I have served on program committees of many top conferences and workshops, such as WWW, WSDM, ICWSM, and KDD.  I served as a reviewer and panelist for National Science Foundation, American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Communication Yearbook, Complexity, Management Science, Physical Review E,  Science,  Social Networks, and other journals.

In Spring 2008 I taught a course about methods for studying complex networks in the Department of Information Science at Cornell University.


Papers, etc.

H. T. Welser, D. Cosley, G. Kossinets, et al. Finding social roles in Wikipedia. Proceedings of the 2011 iConference. Best paper award.

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 homophily in an evolving social network. American Journal of Sociology, 2009. 

G. Kossinets, J. Kleinberg, D. Watts. The Structure of Information Pathways in a Social Communication Network. KDD 2008. I could not attend but Jon gave a great talk.
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.

Once upon a time I wrote a parser for Wikipedia historical database dumps which computes and extracts various useful metadata (in sophisticated yet readable Perl, no less). The data can be downloaded from Jure Leskovec's SNAP archive.