Influence in Social Media Networks: Sinan Aral at TEDxColumbiaEngineering

Sinan Aral is an Assistant Professor and Microsoft Faculty Fellow at the NYU Stern School of Business. He studies how behavioral contagions spread through social networks -- from products to productivity to public health. His novel research on information and behavioral diffusion in massive networks is being applied to a variety of fields including epidemiology, innovation management, organizational performance and development economics. This research has won numerous awards including the Microsoft Faculty Fellowship (2010), the PopTech Science and Public Leaders Fellowship (2010), an NSF Early Career Development (CAREER) Award (2009), the IBM Faculty Award (2009), the ACM SIGMIS Best Dissertation Award (2007), and four Best Paper Awards at the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS). Sinan has been a Fulbright Scholar, serves as Chief Scientist of SocialAmp, a social commerce company that enables targeting and peer referral in social media networks, and is currently an organizer of the Workshop on Information in Networks (WIN): . His work has been published in leading journals such as the American Journal of Sociology, IEEE Intelligent Systems, Information Systems Research, Management Science, Marketing Science, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Science, Organization Science, the Harvard Business Review and the Sloan Management Review, and been mentioned in popular press outlets such as the Economist, the New York Times, Businessweek, Wired and CIO Magazine. Sinan is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Northwestern University and holds masters degrees from the London School of Economics and Harvard University. He received his PhD from MIT. You can follow him on Twitter @sinanaral.
In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)