Watts, Duncan J.

Duncan J. Watts - link
Associate Professor Department of Sociology, Columbia University
Books: Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age
Leader of the Small World Project at Columbia, centered on the idea of six degrees.
"My research centers around the development of new models of large, complex networks that capture the general features of networked social systems, and a coherent set of metrics for characterizing them. The overall goal is to explore the role that network structure plays in determining or constraining system behavior, focussing on a few broad problem areas in social science such as information contagion, financial risk management, and organizational design. I am concerned with issues such as systemic robustness and stability with respect to cascading failures, efficient distributed information processing, and effective procedures for conducting global searches in networks using only local information." (source: Columbia faculty page link above)