About.

Personal Details

My real/official name is Jurij Leskovec
I come from a small Slovenian village called Šentjošt (check the pictures!)
I was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia in May 1980

Education

PhD:
- 2004 - summer 2008 (expected): Machine Learning Department, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, PhD in Computational and Statistical Learning.
  See my thesis proposal document and talk.
BSc:
- 1999 - 2004: University of Ljubljana, Faculty for Computer and Information Science, BSc (a 5 year program) in Computer science.
high school:
- 1995 - 1999: Gimnazija Bežigrad
primary school:
- 1987 - 1991: Osnovna šola Šentjošt
- 1991 - 1995: Osnovna šola Polhov Gradec

Work experience

summer 2006:
- Yahoo Research, Santa Clara, CA, USA.
  With Ravi Kumar, Andrew Tomkins and Lars Backstrom on microscopic (edge-by-edge) evolition of social networks.
  With Michael Mahoney, Kevin Lang and Anirban Dasgupta on existence of communities and communities in large networks.
summer 2006:
- Microsoft Research, Adaptive Systems and Interaction, Redmond, WA, USA.
  With Susan Dumais and Eric Horvitz we were working on web projections (learning from contextual subgraphs of the web), and the dynamics of a instant messenger network of 240 million people (which is the largest social network analyzed up to date).
summer 2005:
- HP Labs, Information Dynamics Lab, Palo Alto, CA, USA.
  With Lada Adamic and Bernardo Huberman we were playing with a large person-to-person product recommendation network. We were measuring the influence of product recommendations on people purchasing products. The basic question is: Does the word-of-mouth really work?
summer 2003:
- Carnegie Mellon University, Computer Science Department, Center for Automated Learning and Discovery, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
  With Christos Faloutsos and Deepayan Chakrabarti we were playing with large graphs. We were exploring power-law graph generation and sampling.
1997 - ...
- Department of Knowledge Technologies at Jozef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
  Projects on machine learning, data mining, text mining, link analysis and Slovenian text to speech technologies.
summer 2002:
- Royal Holloway University of London, Department of computer science, Egham, UK.
  I was working with John Shawe-Taylor on text classification on uneven training sets. We improved boosting using Linear Programming to gain robustness on uneven traing sets.
summer 2001:
- Microsoft Research, Integrated Systems Group, Cambridge UK.
  I was working with Natasa Milic-Frayling on enhancing web browsing history navigation and search over already seen web pages and better in-session navigation. As a result of this work we filed 2 patent applications.
summer 2000:
- European Commission Joint Research Centre , European Union's scientific and technical research laboratory. ISIS Institute (Ispra, Italy). I was working on IDEA project.
1998, 1999:
- Computer Vision Laboratory at Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana.
  Projects on stereoscopic computer vision and object recognition and industrial image registration.
summers 1998 and 1999:
- Lionhearth Technologies, Los Gatos, CA, USA. We were working on 3D characters (avatars) over the internet and real-time stereoscopic image recognition.
1996, 1997:
- Hermes Softlab (largest Slovenian software house). Involved in several projects from the area of system programming.

Honors and Awards

Best paper award at KDD 2007 for a paper Cost-effective Outbreak Detection in Networks. (August 2005)
Microsoft Research Graduate Fellowship (2006)
Best research paper award at KDD 2005 for a paper Graphs over time: densification laws, shrinking diameters and possible explanations. (August 2005)
University of Ljubljana Prešeren Award. Highest university award for students, yearly awarded to 10 students. (2004)
Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts scholarship. Given to 3 doctoral students, based on academic excellence. (2004)
Winner of download estimation task on KDD Cup 2003, a knowledge discovery and data mining competition at ACM SIGKDD Conference. For more info check out the http://ai.ijs.si/kddcup03
developed Govorec, a Slovenia text to speech system, which was awarded by the Government of Republic of Slovenia. (2000)
2nd prize at European Competition for Young Scientists, Thessaloniki, Greece. For Detection of human bodies using a sequence of stereo images.

Professional Activities

Program committee member:
- KDD 2008
- WWW 2008
- WSDM 2008
- ICWSM 2008
- NESCAI 2007
- ECML/PKDD 2007
- ICML 2007
- ECML/PKDD 2006
- ICML 2006
- ECML/PKDD 2005
- AAAI workshop on Link Analysis 2005
Reviewed papers for:
- SIGIR 2007, ECIR 2007, CIKM 2007, AAAI 2007, WWW 2007
- ICDE 2006, AAAI 2006, KDD 2006
- KDD 2005, SIGIR 2005
- KDD 2004, ECIR 2004
- ECML 2003, IJCAI 2003

Hobbies and Interests

sport: I have three big passions
- football (aka soccer)
- as almost everyone in Slovenia I enjoy alpine skiing
- sailing. Adriatic is superb (check the pictures and more pictures!)
society:
- a founding member and the first president of local students' association Silaq
- at some point in time I was dancing at folk dance group Šentjošt
the best food:
- potica
far too many other things