Professor Derek Ruths

Education

PhD: 2009, Computer Science, Rice University
MS: 2006, Computer Science, Rice University
BS: 2003, Computer Science, Rice University

Contact Info

Research Interests

My work concerns predicting the behavior of complex, living systems: from cells to societies. Because limited (and often unreliable) data are available for such systems, I’m particularly interested in mathematical and computational techniques that use easy-to-obtain, structural attributes of the systems to predict how they will change over time. This interest has lead me to work in a variety of areas from cancer biology, to Roman history, to the growth of online social networks.

The group

The Network Dynamics Lab is run by Professor Derek Ruths and is part of the McGill University School of Computer Science. We consist of one professor, a band of graduate students, and a cohort of undergrads - but more importantly we're curious people who enjoy writing code, playing with UNIX, studying genomes, and seeing what Twitter has to say about the human condition. In our research we seek to develop new ways of measuring and modeling large-scale behavior in complex systems, including online social platforms, human communities, political parties, ancient civilizations, and single-celled organisms.

For more about our work and activities, visit our PI's homepage.

News

2013.05.13 - Paper accepted to ICWSM 2013

Our study revealed systematic problems in the way that online demographic inference has been done, particularly where political orientation is concerned.

2013.02.28 - Funding from Public Safety Canada

Our project will monitor and measure large-scale responses on Twitter to man-made and natural disasters.

2012.11.21 - Paper accepted to BMC Bioinformatics

Our paper considers the role of various structural features in transcriptional robustness.

2012.11.16 - Paper accepted to Symposium on Analyzing Microtext

Our paper conducts a comprehensive analysis of names a gender indicators on Twitter.

Join in

We're always looking for enthusiastic, talented undergraduates, graduate students, and post-docs.

Our work requires proficiency in UNIX, programming (python is preferred!), and data analysis. Most importantly, though, we want self-motivated, critical thinkers who would jump at the chance to spend the odd weekend trudging through gigabytes of data to find the answer they're in search of.

If this sounds like you, send Professor Ruths an email. In addition to the usual details, describe a really hard problem you solved and how you did it. Extra points if it involves social informatics.