derek ruths || network dynamics

Graduate Students

Graduate students are the heart of the creative research and development work we conduct. At present we are fortunate to have the following PhD and Master’s students as part of our group.

Faiyaz Al Zamal, PhD student
Mathieu Perreault, Master’s student
Michael Misiewicz, Master’s student (co-advised with Andrea LeBlancin neurology)
Raviv Cohen, Master’s student
Arash Kashi, Master’s student

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.