Jon Kleinberg co-wins the best paper award at WWW 2016

The paper "Social Networks Under Stress", co-written by Jon Kleinberg, his former CAM PhD student Daniel Romero, and Brian Uzzi received the Best Paper Award at WWW 2016, from a pool of 5 nominated papers, 115 accepted papers, and 727 submissions.

As described by phys.org [1], the question addressed by the paper is, "When an organization experiences stressful or unexpected news, does it use its social networks to reach out or to hunker down?" In an analysis of over 22 million IMs exchanged within a large hedge found, 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," the way a turtle pulls its head and feet into its shell in times of stress."


A list of all the 2016 best paper nominees can be found at http://www2016.ca/program/bestpapercandidate.html