Professor Jon Kleinberg, a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science and a member of the PhD Field of Operations Research, has been awarded one of the highest honors accorded to an engineer, election to the National Academy of Engineering.
On February 8, 2008, the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) announced that Professor Jon Kleinberg has been elected as a member. Professor Kleinberg is on the faculty of Computer Science as well as the graduate Field of Operations Research at Cornell.
According to the NAE press release, "Academy membership honors those who have made outstanding contributions to engineering research, practice, or education....and to the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education." Kleinberg joins Field of Operations Research NAE members Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Computer Science Eva Tardos, and Professor Emeritus William Maxwell, who was the Andrew Schultz Jr. Professor of Industrial Engineering.
On his web site, Kleinberg describes his research as "centered around issues at the interface of networks and information, with an emphasis on the social and information networks that underpin the Web and other on-line media."
One of the areas in which his contributions are best known derives from the so-called "Small World" theory popularly characterized by the play and film title "Six Degrees of Separation," Another is in his contribution to web searching: "his work on hubs and authorities is cited alongside [Google's] PageRank as seminal to the current state of web search" according to John Battelle, author of "The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture." In addition to his work on these topics, Kleinberg has authored or co-authored more than 100 papers on such topics as network structured markets, data mining, network routing, protein folding, and the sociology of the web.
In 2005, Kleinberg was named a MacArthur Fellow. Like NAE membership, recipients do not apply for a MacArthur Fellowship; rather, each year the foundation announces 25 $500,000 Fellowship winners coming from wide-ranging fields including humanities and the arts, health, engineering, and science, often to the surprise of the recipients.
In addition to graduate courses relating to his research Kleinberg has developed, with Professor David Easley, a popular undergraduate course entitled "Networks", the course notes for which are a "textbook in progress" according to Kleinberg. Kleinberg is also the coauthor with Professor Tardos of a new textbook on Algorithm Design that grew out of an undergraduate algorithms course that they taught together.
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