My research broadly seeks to understand the role of networks and networked systems, enabled by information technology, in the diffusion of information, behaviors and dynamic processes. As the penetration of online and mobile technologies continues to advance, instant messaging, mobile phone communications, micro-blogs and online social networks are shaping how we interact with the world and each other and creating new interaction dynamics. At the same time, our day-to-day activities are becoming increasingly embedded in new socio-technical infrastructures that permit research into behaviors and their social and economic outcomes at an unprecedented scale and level of detail orders of magnitude greater than what was previously possible. My research aims to develop an empirical understanding of these dynamics and how such an understanding can shape the formation of new policies and incentive structures that seek to promote or discourage behavioral and economic outcomes at the individual, community and population level. The explosion of data provided by new socio-technical systems requires the development of new analysis techniques to deal with relational covariates that are heavily connected, long-tailed and sparsely distributed
