Dr. Manuel Cebrian is senior scientist with NICTA. He is currently scientific advisor for Graphext, a platform for building vertical knowledge graphs. Cebrian has held positions with the University of California at San Diego, MIT, Brown University, and Telefonica Research. He earned a Ph.D. in computer science from Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, where his thesis received the Dissertation of the Year Award for his work on plagiarism networks.
Cebrian's work lies at the intersection of the computer and social sciences. His primary interests include social and financial networks, crowdsourcing, urban economics, behavioral game theory, and evolutionary dynamics. His work has been supported by a FECYT Award, a Caja Madrid Foundation Fellowship, and grants from the Australian Research Council, the US National Science Foundation, DARPA, the US Army Research Office, the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology, and the Masdar Institute of the United Arab Emirates.
Cebrian is particularly interested in understanding to what extent can social networking make it easier to find people and solve real-world problems. His efforts are best illustrated by his participation in the 2009 DARPA Network Challenge, the 2011 DARPA Shredder Challenge, and the 2012 Department of State Tag Challenge. Recent articles by Nature, The Economist, and New Scientist summarise the exciting challenges in this area.