Add another award to Jon Kleinberg's long list of accomplishments. A paper cowritten by the Information Science and Computer Science professor took home Best Paper Award at WWW 2016. Penned by Kleinberg, his former CAM PhD student Daniel Romero, and Brian Uzzi, the paper – "Social Networks Under Stress" – examines a large hedge fund to understand how external events are associated with a social network's change in structure and communications. It was chosen from a pool of five nominated papers, 115 accepted papers and 727 submissions.
As described in a write-up by phys.org, the research team sought to answer whether organizations widen their spheres of communication to social networks during stressful situations. In an analysis of more than 22 million instant-messages exchanged within a large hedge fund, the authors found that "whether the market went up or down, the group reacted in the same way. They communicated more with their closest connections, rather than reaching outside their sphere to gather new information." The researchers refer to this process as "turtling up".
"As a result," Romero said. "They were probably not gathering new information, when they could potentially have gained new and more helpful information by going outside their normal networks."
A list of all the 2016 best paper nominees can be found here.