Riley Crane[ YouTube | Home | Publications | Research Interests ]

Post-Doctoral Fellow Chair of Entrepreneurial Risks ETH Zurich | Switzerland   Phone: +41 44 632 8398 Skype: rileycrane Email: rcrane(at)ethz.ch Riley Crane @ ETHZ Riley Crane @ UCLA

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A short CV [ Full CV]

I completed my undergraduate studies at the University of Texas, Austin, obtaining a B.S. in Physics with University Honors. During this time I wandered between various labs at the University of Texas and also spent a little time at Princeton as a National Undergraduate Fellow. As an undergraduate I also spent six months studying abroad in Lyon, France at Lyon III - Jean Moulin.

Upon graduating I headed out west to pursue my Ph.D. in physics at the Univesity of California, Los Angeles. During this time I had many fortunate experiences working in the laboratory of Dr. George Gruner under the supervision of Dr. N. Peter Armitage. Our work concerned Quantum Phase Transitions in disordered, low-dimensional superconductors. We studied the magnetic field-tuned superconductor-to-insulator transition using an impressive system which combined a cryo-magnetic system with a complicated microwave cavity setup.

Towards the end of my dissertation I became interested in leveraging massive systems in socially beneficial ways. I developed an interesting idea based on the "rational inattention" of humans towards "spare change". The idea was to find a way to focus the enormous amounts of unspent funds in pre-paid "Universal" gift-cards (such as those branded with the Visa or Mastercard logo). The solution is captured in this article. I developed this idea along with Juan Escobar and Didier Sornette, which led me to Zurich.

I am currently a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Didier Sornette's Chair of Entrepreneurial Risks, at ETH Zurich.

Research interests [ PhD | Publications ]

Social systems often experience sudden bursts of activity with the collective attention of millions of individuals suddenly focused on the same thing. This is illustrated for example in search trends for words like "tsunami" and "harry potter". While sometimes the origin of the sudden interest is obvious, other times it is not. Determining the chain of causality for such questions requires disentangling interwoven exogenous and endogenous contributions with either no clear or too many signatures. How can one assert with confidence that a given event or characteristics is really due to an endogenous self-organization of the system, rather than to the response to an external shock? My work is focused on understanding the occurrence of non-trivial herding in society by investigating how individuals' activity is modified by the combination of interactions and external influences in a social network.

Searching for general principles underlying the internal organization of complex systems has been stifled by the lack of an established general framework for designing, testing, and analyzing empirical data. Our investigations into collective human activity provide a consistent theoretical framework and a set of tools that can be easily and generically extended to other studies of complex systems. Using our novel framework, we have recently discovered that collective human dynamics can be robustly classified and we find a surprising emergent law that has its conceptual basis in the physics of fluctuation phenomena.

In addition to fundamental questions, understanding collective human dynamics opens the possibility for a number of tantalizing applications. With the rise of web 2.0 there is an ever-expanding source of interesting media because of the proliferation of user-generated content. However, mixed in with this is a large amount of noise that creates a proverbial ``needle in the haystack'' when searching for relevant content. Although there is hope that the rich network of interwoven metadata may contain enough structure to eventually help sift through this noise, currently many sites serve up only the ``most popular'' things.

Identifying only the most popular items can be useful, but doing so fails to take into account the famous ``long tail'' behavior of the web -- the notion that the collective effect of small, niche interests can outweigh the market share of the few blockbuster (i.e. most-popular) items -- thus providing only content that has mass appeal and masking the interests of the idiosyncratic many. Our approach, which disentangles the individual response from the collective using inherent measures of quality revealed by the dynamics offers new ways of extracting relevance in the face of information overload.

Research and Professional experience

• Post-doctoral researcher. ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), 2006-present.

  Study of complex social, economic, and technological systems. Focus on the collective behavior and prediction of human activity using ideas from statistical physics and fluctuation phenomena. Application of theoretical models of epidemics to massive empirical databases (YouTube, Network Traffic, etc).

• Researcher. Santa Fe Institute Complex Systems Summer School, Summer 2008.

  An intensive Summer school covering complex behavior in mathematical, physical, living, and social systems.

• Entrepreneur. Donation-Payment Card, 2005.

  Developed a novel financial instrument based on currently existing universal gift cards, that leverages the power of large systems in socially beneficial ways.

• Researcher (Ph.D. student). University of California, Los Angeles, 2001-2006.

  Quantum critical phase transitions Experimental investigation of quantum criticality and quantum phase transitions in low-dimensional superconductors. I designed a system and studied the dynamic nature of the critical phase transition (magnetic field-tuned superconductor-to-insulator) using nite-frequency microwave probes.

• Researcher (M.S. student). University of California, Los Angeles, 2000-2001.

  Nanophysics and biophysics Fabrication of nanoscale electronic devices and application of these devices for biosensing and for monitoring biological processes.

• Researcher. Princeton University, Princeton, 1998.

  Non-linear dynamics National Undergraduate Fellowship Study of Helicity Conservation during Magnetic Reconnection in a Laboratory Plasma.

• Researcher. University of Texas, Austin. 1997-1998.

  Non-linear dynamics Undergraduate Research Fellowship Received independent funding to investigate electronic imaging of nonlinear fluid dynamics in a fully developed Taylor-Couette flow.

• Researcher. University of Texas, Austin. 1998-2000.

  Biophysics Studied nanoscale vibrational spectroscopy of biological samples using a near-field apertureless Raman microscope.

Publications [ @ arXiv | Research ]

Complex Systems Research