Abstract: Online social networks have revolutionized human communication
and interaction. This raises significant scientific, societal and business
challenges. From an academic standpoint, it represents a unique opportunity
to understand human behavior at large scale. A critical element of this
needs to be the research at the interface of computer science and the
social sciences. In this talk we provide a number of examples of this
emerging genre of research.

Bio: Prabhakar Raghavan is Vice President of Strategic Technologies at Google.
Raghavan's research interests include text and web mining, and algorithm
design. He is a consulting professor of computer science at Stanford. He
has co-authored two textbooks, on randomized algorithms and on information
retrieval. Raghavan received his PhD from the University of California,
Berkeley and is a member of the NationalAcademy of Engineering and a fellow
of the ACM and of the IEEE; he has also been awarded a *Laurea ad honorem* by
the University of Bologna. Prior to joining Google, he had held positions
as the Head of Yahoo! Labs, the chief technology officer at Verity and at
IBM Research.