Ashton Anderson

Research Interests

I'm broadly interested in research that bridges the gap between computer science and social science. I currently investigate social networks and social media using large-scale empirical studies.

Education

• I completed my Master's in Computer Science at Stanford in June 2010. I worked with Yoav Shoham on Multiagent Systems (where CS and game theory meet), where we studied a natural and well-motivated change to the traditional normal-form game setup.


• In 2008 I graduated from McGill University with a Bachelor of Engineering in Software Engineering. I had a lot of fun and learned a ton during my work with Patrick Hayden on quantum algorithms and quantum information.

Publications

Discovering Value from Community Activity on Focused Question-Answering Sites: A Case Study of Stack Overflow, Ashton Anderson, Dan Huttenlocher, Jon Kleinberg, and Jure Leskovec, KDD 2012.

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.

Abstract: We introduce a constrained mechanism design setting called internal implementation, in which the mechanism designer is explicitly modeled as a player in the game of interest. This distinguished player has the opportunity to modify the game before play. Specifically, the player is able to make reliable binding commitments of outcome-specific monetary transfers to the other players in the game. We characterize the power of internal implementation for certain interesting classes of games, and show that the impact of internal implementation on the utility of the players' and the social welfare is often counterintuitive; for example, the social welfare can be arbitrarily worse after an internal implementation.