Ashton Anderson

I'm a Post-doctoral Researcher in the Computational Social Science group at Microsoft Research in New York City. Before that I was a PhD student advised by Jure Leskovec in the Computer Science department at Stanford University. I'm broadly interested in research that bridges the gap between computer science and the social sciences.

July 2017: I am now an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Toronto. Visit my new web page for updates since I no longer maintain this page.
July 2015: I started working as a Post-doctoral Researcher at Microsoft Research in New York City, in the Computational Social Science group. I will start as an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Toronto in Fall 2017.
December 2014: I was on the job market. My application materials: CV and research statement.
September 2014: Google generously extended my PhD Fellowship for a third year. Thanks to them for the continued support.
June – September 2014: I spent the summer on Facebook's Core Data Science team, hosted by Lada Adamic (Menlo Park).
April 2014: Our paper Engaging with Massive Online Courses was named Best Paper runner-up at WWW 2014.
June – September 2013: I did an internship at Google with Andrew Tomkins, Ravi Kumar, and Sergei Vassilvitskii (Mountain View).
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.
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 (published in Sociological Science).

Auditing Search Engines for Differential Satisfaction Across Demographics, Rishabh Mehrotra, Ashton Anderson, Fernando Diaz, Amit Sharma, Hanna Wallach, Emine Yilmaz, WWW 2017.

Assessing Human Error Against a Benchmark of Perfection, Ashton Anderson, Jon Kleinberg, Sendhil Mullainathan, KDD 2016.

Exploring limits to prediction in complex social systems, Travis Martin, Jake M. Hofman, Amit Sharma, Ashton Anderson, Duncan J. Watts, WWW 2016

Global Diffusion via Cascading Invitations: Structure, Growth, and Homophily, Ashton Anderson, Dan Huttenlocher, Jon Kleinberg, Jure Leskovec, Mitul Tiwari, WWW 2015.

The Structural Virality of Online Diffusion, Sharad Goel, Ashton Anderson, Jake Hofman, Duncan J. Watts, Management Science, 2015.

Political Ideology and Racial Preferences in Online Dating, Ashton Anderson, Sharad Goel, Gregory Huber, Neil Malhotra, Duncan J. Watts, Sociological Science, 2014.

Engaging with Massive Online Courses, Ashton Anderson, Dan Huttenlocher, Jon Kleinberg, and Jure Leskovec, WWW 2014. Best Paper runner-up.

The Dynamics of Repeat Consumption, Ashton Anderson, Ravi Kumar, Andrew Tomkins, Sergei Vassilvitskii, WWW 2014.

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

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.