Ashton Anderson

Hi! I'm a 3rd-year PhD student in the Computer Science department at Stanford University, and I'm broadly interested in research that bridges the gap between computer science and the social sciences. I'm advised by Jure Leskovec and Yoav Shoham.

June – September 2012: I spent the summer at Microsoft Research New York City (MSR-NYC). I worked with Sharad Goel, Jake Hofman, and Duncan Watts on a very cool and fun project about virality. Look for it in the coming months...
June 2012: I won the 2012 Google PhD Fellowship in Social Computing! Thanks, Google!
June – September 2011: I interned at Yahoo! Research in the Human Social Dynamics group with Duncan Watts. We did a project on racial preferences in online dating (with Sharad Goel; publication forthcoming).

Steering User Behavior With Badges, Ashton Anderson, Dan Huttenlocher, Jon Kleinberg, and Jure Leskovec, WWW 2013 (to appear).

Towards a Computational History of the ACL: 1980 – 2008, Ashton Anderson, Dan McFarland, and Dan Jurafsky,
ACL 2012 Special Workshop on Rediscovering 50 Years of Discoveries.

Effects of User Similarity in Social Media, Ashton Anderson, Dan Huttenlocher, Jon Kleinberg, and Jure Leskovec, WSDM 2012.

Internal Implementation, Ashton Anderson, Yoav Shoham, Alon Altman, AAMAS 2010.

I completed my Master's in Computer Science at Stanford in June 2010. I worked with Yoav Shoham in the general area of Multiagent Systems (where CS and game theory meet) on elucidating the concepts of "competition" and "cooperation".
In 2008 I graduated from McGill University with a Bachelor of Engineering in Software Engineering. I had a lot of fun and learned to love research during my work with Patrick Hayden on quantum algorithms and quantum information.

You can contact me at [my first name] @cs.stanford.edu.