Prospective Students

Are you interested in doing exciting and interesting research in computer science? Here I want to share with you my thoughts on what makes research in that area so fascinating, but also challenging, as well as my approach to research.

One focus of my current research is on online social networks and social networking applications. Online social networks have revolutionized the way we interact and share information over the Internet, and social networking applications such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat etc., have millions of active users. While already being enormously popular, these applications only scratch the surface of online social networking possibilities. The goal of this research project is to investigate and find new and creative ways of how to make use of social networking applications to enrich people's everyday lives. Answering this question poses challenging and fascinating research problems that require both creativity and rigorous mathematical analysis. As part of the project, we are developing novel mathematical models of how online social networks are formed, and are trying to find creative ways to use the resulting network topologies to efficiently share/distributed information. For this we combine techniques and methods from probability, optimization, graph, and game theory. Another aspect of social networks that we are interested in, is the understanding the user behavior in social networks, in particular understanding incentives for users to form and participate in social networks, as well as understand the importance of communities, influence and reputation in social networks. While this research focuses on online social networks, our models and results also provide surprising insights into how and why the social networks that we form and use in our everyday life are so important and efficient.

If you are interested in a theoretical approch to study fundamental research problems that are important and have can impact on our everyday lives, then the research that we do in my research group could be a perfect fit for you.