Grant Schoenebeck selected for facebook faculty award

Prof. Grant Schoenebeck has been selected as the recipient of a Facebook Faculty Award for his work in theoretical computer science and its potential for impact in the area of social networking.

Prof. Schoenebeck’s research brings a theoretical computer science perspective to the study of social networks and has affected diverse areas of this field including network cascades, coordination games, social learning, link analysis, algorithms for approximating graph properties, and detecting network structure.

He is currently working on better understanding “complex” contagions, which, unlike diseases and rumors, typically require more than one neighbor for infection. Complex contagions model how a wide-range of phenomena, including financial defaults and adoption of expensive new technologies or behaviors, spread in a social network. The goal is to better promote the spreading of good contagions, while suppressing the spread of bad ones.

More broadly, his research includes investigations of linear and semidefinite programs, the intersection of computer science and social networks, the intersection of computer science and economics, NP-complete optimization problems, and computational complexity theory.

Prof. Schoenebeck received his PhD in Computer Science from University of California, Berkeley in 2010 and was a Simons Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Theoretical Computer Science at Princeton University. He joined the faculty at Michigan in 2012. He has taught EECS 574, Computational Complexity Theory; EECS 203, Discrete Math; and EECS 598-06, Social Networks: Reasoning about Structure and Processes. He is affiliated with the Theory Lab in CSE.