December 13, 2005 —
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Kempe: CAREER awardee is algorithm researcher and programming team coach.
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David Kempe has joined the
distinguished circle of Viterbi School faculty who have received NSF
Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) awards.
The highly competitive grants are given “in support of the early
career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who most
effectively integrate research and education within the context of the
mission of their organization.”
Kempe’s $400,000 award will underwrite five years of research on
modeling epidemics in networks.
“Epidemic phenomena in networks occur
when an infectious disease, computer virus, behavior, piece of
information, or innovation is disseminated in a highly decentralized
and parallel way along the links of a social or computer network.
Epidemic phenomena often have a strong effect on society,” Kemp’s abstract notes.
“Given the increasingly detailed data available about social and
computer networks, it is becoming feasible to model such epidemic
phenomena accurately, and to address algorithmically the problems of
minimizing or maximizing the spread of an epidemic in a network.”
Kempe, along CS colleague Sven Koenig, is one of the organizers of the
USC Programming Contest, an ongoing effort to identify and support
programming talent for competition in ACM contests.
Prior to coming to USC in 2004, the assistant professor was a
postdoctorate at the University of Washington. He received his Ph.D. in
2003 from Cornell University.
