[I moved to EPFL in December 2016, so this website isn't updated any longer. My new website lives at http://dlab.epfl.ch/people/west/.]

Hi, I'm Robert West, but you can call me Bob, or His Bobness, or Bobber, or El Boberino if you're not into the whole brevity thing.

My research aims to understand, predict, and enhance human behavior in social and information networks by developing techniques in data science, data mining, network analysis, machine learning, and natural language processing.

Previously, I received a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University (advised by Jure Leskovec), an MSc from McGill University in Montreal, and a Diplom from Technische Universität München in Munich.

Contact

Email: click here to see it
Office location: William Gates Computer Science Building, Room 450

News

• 2016/12/23: Co-organizing Wiki Workshop 2017 @ WWW 2017 in Perth, Australia, on April 3 or 4, 2017 (exact date TBD) — consider submitting a paper or extended abstract!
• 2016/12/23: Co-organizing Applied Machine Learning Days at EPFL on January 30/31, 2017 — register now!
• 2016/06/22: Super excited to start as a tenure-track assistant professor at EPFL in Switzerland in late 2016
• 2016/04/19: PhD thesis successfully defended
• 2016/04/13: Our paper on "Growing Wikipedia across Languages via Recommendation" was featured as a best-paper runner-up at WWW'16.
• 2015/12/30: Co-organizing Wiki Workshop 2016 @ WWW and ICWSM — consider submitting a paper or extended abstract!
• 2015/12/15: Two papers accepted to WWW'16
• 2015/12/03: Plenary talk on "Death of famous people in the media" at GESIS Computational Social Science Winter Symposium in Cologne, Germany
• 2015/10/14: Paper with Ashwin Paranjape, Jure Leskovec, and Leila Zia (Wikimedia) accepted to WSDM'16
• 2015/09/08: Invited talk at GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Cologne, Germany
• 2015/08/07: Gave a guest lecture to the super smart and curious girls taking part in the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory's Outreach Summer.
• 2015/06/02: Invited talk at the Language and Network Science Symposium at NetSci 2015 in Zaragoza, Spain
• 2015/05/26: I won the 2015 ICWSM Science Slam with a talk about Unfun.me! :)
• 2015/05/26: Our ICWSM Workshop on Wikipedia, a Social Pedia: Research Challenges and Opportunities in Oxford was a great success!
• 2014/11/26: Invited talk at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Saarbrücken, Germany
• 2014/11/20: Guest lecture in Stanford's "Minds and Machines" class (SymSys-100)
• Try Unfun.me — a fun language game!

Publications [Google Scholar]

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

Writings &c.

• My talk that won the ICWSM 2015 Science Slam
• Wikipedia's fixed point
• Reinforcement Learning by Example (by Cosmin Păduraru, Robert West, and Imad Khoury), winner of the award for "best educational video" at the IJCAI-09 AI Video Competition (I'm accepting the reward at minute 8:30 in the award ceremony)
• A letter of mine once made it into Time magazine (it's the third letter on the page)
• A Chilean newspaper once called me "El extraño personaje"
• Blips 'n' quips
• Clumsyboard: A Program for Entering Patterns over the Keyboard [PDF]

Deutsches

• A long time ago I had my three minutes of fame on Bavarian state TV
• About ten years later, I made a three-line reappearance in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
• Ein rechnergestützter Vergleich von Jacob Baldes Encomium toruitatis mit der übrigen lateinischen Literatur [PDF] — Ergebnisse (siehe PDF für Erklärung): [sortiert nach Stelle bei Balde] [sortiert nach Stelle bei anderem Autor]
• Venus' Rede in der Götterversammlung (Vergil, Aeneis 10.18–62) [PDF]
• Inhalt der Bücher VII, VIII und XII von Vergils Aeneis [PDF]
• Agricolas Statthalterschaft in Britannien (Tacitus, Agricola 19–21) [PDF]