Ceren Budak|| E-mail: cbudak@umich.edu| Website: cbudak.com|Contact
Information

4322 North Quad105 S. State Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
Mobile: +1-805-570-6001

ResearchInterests

My research interests lie in the area of computational social science, a discipline at theintersection of computer science, statistics, and the social sciences. I am particularlyinterested in applying large scale data analysis techniques to study problems with social,political, and policy implications.

Education

PhD. in Computer Science
September 2007 to December 2012
Computer Science Department, University of California, Santa Barbara• Supervisors: Professor Amr El Abbadi, Professor Divyakant Agrawal• Focus: Information Diffusion in Online Social Networks• CGPA: 3.98/4.00
Bachelor in Computer Science
September 2003 to June 2007
Department of Computer Science, Bilkent University, Turkey• Graduated ranking 1st• CGPA: 3.96/4.00, Major CGPA: 4.00/4.00

Employment

Assistant Professor
University of Michigan, School of Information

November 2015 to - present
Ann Arbor, MI

Postdoctoral Researcher
July 2013 to - July 2015
Microsoft Research
New York, NY
Research area: computational social science. Below are three specific examples:• Quantifying selection bias and slant in U.S. news media (collaborators: SharadGoel and Justin M. Rao)
• Pluralism and solidarity during the Gezi uprising (collaborator: Duncan J. Watts)• Estimating the economics of third-party advertising and the potential impact ofDo-Not-Track on online advertising (collaborators: Sharad Goel, Justin M. Rao,and Giorgos Zervas)
Research Assistant
September 2009 to December 2012
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA
Main research area: social networks research, with a particular focus on informationdiffusion. Other research problems include data management solutions for developing regions and solving path problems on the GPU. (advisors: Professors Amr El
Abbadi and Divyakant Agrawal)
Research Intern
May 2012 to August 2012
Microsoft Research
Mountain View, CAGroup dynamics in Twitter education chats; more particularly in capturing thefactors for a Twitter user to become a member of a particular chat group. (advisor:Rakesh Agrawal)

1 of 4

Research Intern
May 2011 to August 2011
Microsoft Research
Mountain View, CA
Inferring user interests in online social networks through graphical and diffusion
models. (advisors: Rakesh Agrawal, Anitha Kannan)
Teaching Assistant
September 2007 to June 2009, March-May 2011
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA
Graduate (advanced topics in databases) and undergraduate (data structures, algorithms, programming and scientific computing) courses. Responsible for discussion
sessions and labs
Summer Intern, Google
June-September 2009,New York, NY
Worked in the DeepWeb team on the problem of non-numerical value prediction for
discovering new urls. Supervisor: Jeff Cox
Summer Intern, Yahoo
June-September 2008, Sunnyvale, CA
Worked in Data Systems Group (Strategic Data Solutions, SDS) on the problem ofcapacity modeling. Supervisor: Partha SahaSummer Intern, Tom Sawyer Software
July-September 2006, Oakland, CA
Created constraint, accuracy, memory and CPU usage tests for Tom Sawyer products. Supervisor: Wendy Feng
Summer Intern, Havelsan Inc.
June-July 2005, Ankara, Turkey
Implemented a UI to view/edit a DB, and convert data to XML format.

Publications
In Progress[1] Ceren Budak, Sharad Goel, Justin M. Rao, Giorgos Zervas. Do-Not-Track and theEconomics of Third-Party Advertising Available at SSRN 250564[2] Ceren Budak, Anitha Kannan (Microsoft Research), Rakesh Agrawal (MicrosoftResearch), Jan Pedersen (Microsoft). Inferring User Interests in Online Social
Networks. Working Paper, MSR-TR-2014-68, May 2014

Published
Conference &Journal Papers[3] Ceren Budak, Sharad Goel, Justin M. Rao. Fair and Balanced? Quantifying Media
Bias Through Crowdsourced Content Analysis, Public Opinion Quarterly.
[4] Ceren Budak, Duncan J. Watts. Dissecting the Spirit of Gezi: Influence vs. selection in the Occupy Gezi movement. Sociological Science.
[5] Divyakant Agrawal, Amr El Abbadi, Vaibhav Arora, Ceren Budak, Theodore Georgiou, Hatem A. Mahmoud, Faisal Nawab, Cetin Sahin, Shiyuan Wang. Mind
your Ps and Vs: A perspective on the challenges of big data management andprivacy concerns. BigComp 2015: 1-6[6] Ceren Budak, Theodore Georgiou, Divyakant Agrawal, Amr El Abbadi. GeoScope:Online Detection of Geo-Correlated Information Trends in Social Networks Proceedings of VLDB Endowment (PVLDB) 2014
[7] Divyakant Agrawal, Ceren Budak, Amr El Abbadi, Theodore Georgiou, XifengYan. Big Data in Online Social Networks: User Interaction Analysis to Model
User Behavior in Social Networks. DNIS 2014: 1-16
[8] Ceren Budak, Rakesh Agrawal (Microsoft Research). On Participation in Group
Chats on Twitter. 22nd International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW’13)

2 of 4

[9] Ceren Budak, Divyakant Agrawal, Amr El Abbadi. Diffusion of Information inSocial Networks: Is it All Local? International Conference on Data Mining(ICDM) 2012.
[10] Ceren Budak, Divyakant Agrawal, Amr El Abbadi. Structural Trend Analysis for Online Social Networks Proceedings of VLDB Endowment (PVLDB),
4(10):646656, July 2011.
[11] Ceren Budak, Divyakant Agrawal, Amr El Abbadi. Limiting the Spread of Misinformation in Social Networks Proceedings of the 20th international conference on
World Wide Web (WWW’11) pages 665-674, New York, NY, USA, 2011. ACM.
[12] Ceren Budak, Divyakant Agrawal, Amr El Abbadi. Where the Blogs Tip: Connectors, Mavens, Salesmen and Translators of the Blogosphere Proceedings of theFirst Workshop on Social Media Analytics (SOMA ’10) pages: 106-114, NewYork, NY, USA, 2010. ACM.
[13] Aydin Buluc, John R. Gilbert, Ceren Budak. Solving Shortest Path Problems on
the GPU Parallel Computing 36(5-6): 241-253 (2010)
Tutorials[14] Divyakant Agrawal, Ceren Budak, Amr El Abbadi. Information Diffusion in Social
Networks: Observing and Affecting What Society Cares About Proceedings ofthe 20th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM2011) pages: 2609-2610[15] Divyakant Agrawal, Ceren Budak, Amr El Abbadi. Information Diffusion in Social
Networks: Observing and Influencing Societal Interests Proceedings of VLDB
Endowment (PVLDB), 4(12): 1512-1513 (2011)

Workshop[16] Ceren Budak, Sharad Goel, Justin M. Rao. Fair and Balanced? Quantifying Media
Presentations &Bias Through Crowdsourced Content Analysis, Social science track at ICWSMBook Chapters2015[17] Ceren Budak, Duncan J. Watts. Dissecting the Spirit of Gezi: Influence vs. selection in the Occupy Gezi movement. Social science track at ICWSM 2015[18] Ceren Budak, Divyakant Agrawal, Amr El Abbadi. The Fallacy of Pigeonholing
Global Users into Local Models Workshop for Information and Decisions inSocial Networks (WIDS 2012).
[19] Ceren Budak, Divyakant Agrawal, Amr El Abbadi. Information Diffusion in Social
Networks: Is Friendship the Dominant Force? Workshop on Information inNetworks (WIN 2012)[20] Ceren Budak, Divyakant Agrawal, Amr El Abbadi. Structure-Aware Trend Detection in Online Social Networks Workshop on Information in Networks (WIN2011)[21] Divyakant Agrawal, Bassam Bamieh, Ceren Budak, Amr El Abbadi, Andrew J.Flanagin,
Stacy Patterson: Data-Driven Modeling and Analysis of Online Social Networks
Web-Age Information Management, volume 6897 of Lecture Notes in Computer
Science, pages 317. Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, 2011

3 of 4

Invited Talks• Quantifying Pluralism and Solidarity in Social Movements: A Case Study of Gezi
Park Uprising in Turkey. The Center for Middle East Studies Distinguished Lecture
Series, University of California Santa Barbara, November 2014
• Fair and Balanced? Quantifying U.S. News Media Bias through Crowdsourced Content AnalysisDepartment of Computer Science, University of California Santa Barbara, November 2014
• Quantifying Political Slant and Selection Bias of U.S. News Media. COSN Committee Members Workshop, Microsoft Research Mountain View, July 2014
• Understanding and Managing the Diffusion of Information in Online Social Networks. NEC Japan, March, 2014
• Understanding and Managing the Diffusion of Information in Online Social Networks. Kyoto University, March, 2014
• Big Data in Online Social Networks: User Interaction Analysis to Model User Behavior in Social Networks. Keynote Speaker, 9th Annual Workshop on Databases in
Networked Information Systems, March, 2014
• The Future of Social Science Research: A Computational Social Science Perspective.
Womensphere 5th Annual Emerging Leaders Global Summit, January, 2014
• Navigating Through the Vast Space of Online Social Networks Research. Technicolor
Labs, Palo Alto, CA, 2012
• Use of Online Social Networks in Business: A Case for Viral Marketing and Redefining Influentials. Istanbul Chamber of Commerce, Istanbul, Turkey, 2011
• Information Diffusion in Online Social Networks - Exploring the Vast Problem Space.
Istanbul Sehir University, Istanbul Turkey, 2011
• Information Diffusion in Online Social Networks - Exploring the Vast Problem Space.
Koc University, Istanbul Turkey, 2011
• Information Diffusion in Social Networks: Observing and Influencing Societal Interests Tutorial presentation with Profs. Divyakant Agrawal and Amr El Abbadi inVLDB (International Conference on Very Large Databases), 2011
• Information Diffusion in Social Networks: Observing and Affecting What Society
Cares About. Tutorial presented single-handedly in CIKM (Conference on Information and Knowledge Management), 2011

ProfessionalActivities• Registration chair for COSN (ACM Conference on Online Social Networks) 2015
• Program Committee Member for:
• WWW (International Conference on World Wide Web) 2015,2016• ICWSM (International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media) 2015
• HCOMP (Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing) 2015
• WSDM (International ACM Conference on Web Search and Data Mining) 2014,2015• COSN (ACM Conference on Online Social Networks) 2014,2015• ICDM (IEEE International Conference on Data Mining) 2014
• SIGMOD (ACM Special Interest Group On Management of Data Conference)
2013• Organizer for MSR NYC Data Science Seminar Series (for more info, please visit
research.microsoft.com/en-us/events/msrnycdss/default.aspx)• Instructor for Microsoft Research Data Science Summer School (for more info, please
visit https://ds3.research.microsoft.com)

4 of 4