Aaron Clauset

Aaron Clauset is an American computer scientist. He studies networks, machine learning, and complex systems. He teaches computer science at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Education
Clauset studied physics and computer science at Haverford College, finishing in 2001.Curriculum vitae, retrieved 2024-06-04. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2006 from the University of New Mexico with honors. Subsequently, he held a prestigious research fellowship at the Santa Fe Institute until 2010.

Career
In 2010, Clauset joined the faculty as a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder in the Computer Science Department. There, he was also core faculty in the BioFrontiers Institute, whose goal is to improve global health and welfare. In 2014, he joined the editorial board of the journal Science Advances as one of their first Associate Editors. In 2017, he became Deputy Editor for social and interdisciplinary science. At the University of Colorado Boulder, he has promoted to Associate Professor in 2017 and to Full Professor in 2022. In 2016, he was awarded the Erdos-Renyi Prize in Network Science, and in 2021 he was named a Fellow of the Network Science Society.

Clauset is best known for his 2009 work with Cosma Shalizi, a statistician at Carnegie Mellon University, and Mark Newman, a physicist at the University of Michigan, on evaluating whether data plausibly follow a power law distribution (a kind of mathematical pattern). This question was particularly interesting to scientists studying complex social and biological systems, where observing a power law would give hints about what processes shaped the behavior of those systems. Clauset's work on this topic showed, to many scientist's surprise, that many data sets that scientists had thought followed the pattern did not, in fact, follow it. In 2019, Clauset used these techniques to show that real-world networks were much more complicated and interesting than predicted by a very popular model of networks, called the scale-free network model. Clauset is also well known for his contributions in network science to finding groups (sometimes called community structure) in networks, which is the network equivalent of cluster analysis. Since 2015, he has been active in the metascience community, for a number of studies of scientific careers, and the role of prestige in shaping productivity, prominence, attrition, and the spread of ideas.

References

Category:Living people
Category:American computer scientists
Category:American academics