The No. 84 lecture of Tsinghua Information Forum , also the first lecture in NEC Series, was successfully held in Lecture Hall of FIT building on May 16, 2012. Prof. Jon Kleinberg from Cornell University gave a talk about “Computational Models of Social Phenomena in Networks”. In the talk, Prof. Kleinberg introduced some of the current models that are being developed in this area, with a focus on the question of how individuals evaluate one another in different settings. These models seek to capture different effects in the process of evaluation, from the type of friend/enemy judgments that characterize the theory of structural balance in sociology to the ways in which credit is assigned to scientific researchers.

After the lecture, Prof. Kleinberg met young professors from the department of computer science. This lecture was hosted by Dr. Jie Tang, and more than 100 faculty members and students attended this lecture.

Prof. Kleinberg is a professor of computer science at Cornell University. His research focuses on issues at the interface of networks and information, with an emphasis on the social and information networks that underpin the Web and other on-line media. His work has been supported by an NSF Career Award, an ONR Young Investigator Award, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Packard Foundation Fellowship, a Sloan Foundation Fellowship, and grants from Google, Yahoo!, and the NSF. Prof. Kleinberg is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.