Networks Team Members 2005- 2008

Photo of Geri Gay and Bill Gates
Robert Barker/University Photography

During his February 2004 visit to campus, Bill Gates met with Professor Geri Gay, one of the co-directors of the Getting Connected theme project, who briefed him on Cornell's interdisciplinary program in computing and information science. Copyright © Cornell University

Microsoft Research, the software industry's first computer science research organization, has announced a gift of $60K to Cornell to support two post doctoral fellowships. $50K will go to the Institute for Social Science for research on networks in cyberspace and, and another $10K will go to the Department of Communication. Michael Macy, one of the co-directors of the Getting Connected theme project, called the grant "an important step in developing a close partnership between social and information scientists at Cornell and MSR interested in the study of networks using data from the Internet." That partnership, Macy envisions, will also involve research opportunities for Cornell students as interns at MSR. Tom Lento, a graduate student in Sociology whom Macy supervises, spent last fall as an intern at MSR, working with Marc Smith on Wallop, "a research project of the Social Computing Group at Microsoft Research, exploring how people share media and build conversations in the context of social networks". Along with fellow ISS "thememate" Jon Kleinberg, Macy will visit MSR this spring to share ideas and explore opportunities for collaboration, including the possibility to host an MSR-sponsored workshop at Cornell next year as part of the Getting Connected theme project. Macy and Kleinberg are also principal investigators for the $2 million Cybertools Project recently awarded to Cornell by the National Science Foundation, which will bring the Internet Archive to Cornell and make it available as a database for social and information scientists interested in the study of diffusion and network evolution.