Marian-Andrei Rizoiu

Marian-Andrei Rizoiu is Senior Lecturer in Behavioral Data Science with the University of Technology Sydney, leading the Behavioral Data Science group, studying the dynamics of human attention in the online environment. His research has made several key contributions, particularly in the areas of online popularity prediction and online privacy. For the past several years, he has been developing theoretical models for online information diffusion, which can account for complex social phenomena, such as the rise and fall of online popularity, the spread of misinformation or the adoption of disruptive technologies. He approached questions such as "Why did X become popular, but not Y?" and "How can items be promoted?" with implications in advertising and marketing.

Marian-Andrei has also worked on detecting the evolution of privacy loss over time. His research has shown that privacy "leaks" over time and it identified the factors causing the loss: the individual's own actions and the environment. The conclusions were staggering: privacy continues to decrease even for users who retired from activity. Marian-Andrei published in the most selective venues of the field (such as WWW, WSDM, ICWSM or CIKM) and his work has received significant media attention, including from the Wikimedia Foundation for the work concerning the privacy of Wikipedia editors (which featured in the March 2016 Wikimedia Research Showcase). See more at http://www.rizoiu.eu