Dr. D. E. Shaw

Manuel Cebrian

I am currently a senior research fellow with the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and an assistant research scientist with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. I received a Ph.D. in computer science from Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (Spain) in 2007. I recently finished a stint as a visiting scientist with the Data Science team at Facebook. Previously, I worked as a junior researcher with the User Modeling Laboratory at Telefonica Research, after a first postdoctoral experience with the Department of Computer Science at Brown University.

My work lies at the intersection of the computer and social sciences. My primary interests include social and financial networks, crowdsourcing, consumer research, urban economics, epidemiology, behavioral game theory, and evolutionary dynamics.

I am particularly involved in hands-on research in time-critical social mobilization, which is best illustrated by our participation in the 2009 DARPA Network Challenge, the 2011 DARPA Shredder Challenge, and the recent 2012 Department of State Tag Challenge.


Selected projects

  1. Population dynamics of extremist forums under stress, M. Cebrian, M. Torres, R. Huerta, and J. Fowler, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (under revision).
  2. Quantifying social influence in an online cultural market, C. Krumme, M. Cebrian, G. Pickard, and A. Pentland, PLoS ONE 7(5):e35348 (2012). Press: 1, 2, 3.
  3. Finding red balloons with split contracts: robustness to individuals' selfishness, M. Cebrian, L. Coviello, A. Vattani, and P. Voulgaris, Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC), New York, USA (2012).
  4. Sensing the 'health state' of a community, A. Madan, M. Cebrian, S. Moturu, K. Farrahi, and A. Pentland, IEEE Pervasive Computing Magazine (forthcoming). Press: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
  5. Modeling dynamical influence in human interaction, W. Pan, W. Dong, M. Cebrian, T. Kim, J. Fowler, and A. Pentland, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine 29(2):77-86 (2012). Press: 1.
  6. Social networks and spin glasses, S. Kirkpatrick, A. Kulakovsky, M. Cebrian, and A. Pentland, Philosophical Magazine 92(1-3):362-377 (2012).
  7. Stealing reality: when criminals become data scientists (or vice versa), Y. Altshuler, N. Aharony, Y. Elovici, A. Pentland, and M. Cebrian, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Systems 26(6):22-30 (2011). Press: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
  8. Time-critical social mobilization, G. Pickard, W. Pan, I. Rahwan, M. Cebrian, R. Crane, A. Madan, and A. Pentland, Science 334(6055):509-512 (2011). Press: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
  9. Reflecting on the DARPA Red Balloon Challenge, J. Tang, M. Cebrian, N. Giacobe, H-W. Kim, T. Kim, and D. Wickert, Communications of the ACM 54(4):78-85 (2011).
  10. Social sensing for epidemiological behavior change, A. Madan, M. Cebrian, D. Lazer, and A. Pentland, Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp) pp. 291-300, Copenhagen, Denmark (2010).

Contact information

+1 (858) 534-6441 (office)
+1 (858) 534-7029 (fax)
cebrian@mit.edu
Wiesner Building (E15), 20 Ames Street
Media Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA 02139-4307, USA