Rick Barber

I am a first year Master's student in the computer science department at Stanford University working in the InfoLab with Jure Leskovec. I recently finished my undergrad at the University of Illinois where I studied computer science and worked with the Data Mining Research Group under the direction of Jiawei Han studying information and social networks and Tim Weninger studying networks as well as web structure mining.

My primary research interest is studying social and information networks, but I have interests within data mining, machine learning, and bioinformatics.

Besides my research interest in the computational aspects network science, I have at least two goals for shaping the culture of the field:

One is to see the field break out of the "computational social science" box that almost all of the celebrated results are confined within. Everyone loves to include beautiful slides with complex metabolic networks in presentations to nonexperts, for instance, but the proportion of actual results not covering some phenomenological aspect of whatever social network is hot at the time--fascinating as many of these results are--is disappointingly low.

Secondly, due to the power of the network paradigm, more and more fields are investigating many of the same questions in parallel, in some cases with little awareness of one another. Thus, I am committed to increasing cross-pollination of ideas between disciplines like physics (physics of networks, statistical mechanics), some areas of mathematics (random matrix theory, stochastic dynamical systems), systems biologists and mathematical biologists, control theory and the social sciences by incorporating viewpoints from these fields into my own work.

Education

Stanford University
B.S. in Engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (Fall 2008 - Spring 2011)

Research/Academic Work

InfoLab (Summer 2011 - Present)
Studying social and information networks under Jure Leskovec

Data Mining Research Group (Summer 2010 - Summer 2011)
Working on novel approaches to several problems in web mining as well as information networks. Both guided and independent research under the direction of Tim Weninger and Prof. Jiawei Han

Data Sciences Summer Institute (Summer 2010)
Worked as a research fellow in an intensive program which consisted of a classroom and project component. Work was focused in the areas of data mining, machine learning, information retrieval, and computer vision. Center for Simulation of Advanced Rockets (Summer 2009 - Summer 2010)
Research consisted mostly of work on massive 3d triangulated surface meshes with Eric Shaffer. In particular, we studied feature detection, mesh optimization methods, and visualization of functions all implemented as in-house C++ libraries.

Publications


Teaching

CS 173: Discrete Structures (Spring 2009, Spring 2010) CS 125: Intro to Computer Science (Fall 2009)

Work

Robotex Inc, Palo Alto, California (2007)
Contact: Adam Gettings
Physical modeling for PK1 and PK2 6-wheeled robotic platforms

Math Resource Center, Godfrey, IL (2007-2008)
Contact: Linda Fassero
Tutoring Precalculus, Calculus, and Differential Equations

Coursework

To see a detailed course history click here.

Hobbies and Other Interests

Click here for all of that

Contact

I can be reached by email or telephone (217) 371-0313.

My calendar