Chris Volinsky   Director Statistics Research Department AT&T Labs-Research

Read all about our winning entry in the Netflix Prize!!!

My Research

My research in the field of statistics and data mining focuses on analysis of massive data, specifically transactional data. I am particularly interested in networks, and analysis and visualization tools that use graphs to represent those networks. For an example, see our paper and web page on Proximity Graphs.

Since I do research into social networks, I suppose I am required to have pages on Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn. I don't have much of a social network yet so feel free to add me to yours! All in the name of research...

Other research interests include:

• Fraud and anomaly detection.
• Statistical computation and visualization, particularly for graph and network data (mostly Splus/R)
• Bayesian Modeling, specifically Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA).  I maintain a BMA web page which includes downloadable software.
• Statistical applications to baseball, sabermetrics

Full Publications List

Students

• Co-advisor of Shawndra Hill, Ph.D Candidate, NYU Information Systems Program.
  Dissertation topic: "Deriving Value from Consumer Networks"

Personal Info and Miscellanea

• I'm kind of a baseball nut - grew up reading Bill James' Baseball Abstracts and poring over the Sunday newspaper lists of statstics. The best site for commentary and analysis is Baseball Prospectus, for stats is baseball-reference.com.
• I like beer.
• Internet radio is far superior to the commercial nonsense on the radio these days. My favorite streams: KEXP in Seattle (independent music);  Radio Paradise, Creamy Radio, and RadioIO Eclectic, all esoteric mixes of hits and deep cuts; Dashnine Radio (indi garage rock); monkeyradio ,  SomaFM's Groove Salad, and JazzMusique, which are cool, groovy, jazzy, downtempo mixes .
• Do you live in New York and need a massage?  Check out my brother Bob, a licensed massaged therapist who also does shiatsu, reiki, aromatherapy and magnet therapy.
• Random Collection of interesting web pages the BabyName Wizard the Seattle alternative paper The Stranger (home of Savage Love) the truth about Urban Legends the best info source on the web, Wikipedia . and its evil twin, the Uncyclopedia

Contact Info