Yaniv Altshuler

Yaniv Altshuler, (born 1978) is an Israeli computer scientist and entrepreneur. He is a researcher at the MIT Media Lab, at the Human Dynamics group headed by professor Alex Pentland.

Yaniv Altshuler
Yaniv Altshuler
Born1978
Rishon Le Zion, Israel
CitizenshipIsraeli
Alma materMIT
Technion
Known forSocial Physics, Swarm Intelligence, Information diffusion models in Social Networks
Scientific career
InstitutionsMIT, Technion
ThesisMulti-Agent Robotics in Dynamic Environments
Doctoral advisorProf. Alfred Bruckstein and Dr. Israel Wagner

In 2014 he co-founded Endor, an MIT spinoff, financially backed by Eric Schmidt, that offers analytics to help understand, predict, and influence the dynamics of human behavior.

Together with Pentland, Altshuler is one of the creators of Social Physics – a theory that describes mathematical laws that govern the behavior of human crowds.

Biography

Altshuler received his Ph.D in Computer Science from the Technion in Israel, under the supervision of Prof. Alfred Bruckstein and Dr. Israel Wagner, focusing on the optimization of Drone Swarms. After graduating from the Technion and before arriving to MIT he was a post-doctoral researcher at Deutsche Telekom Innovation Laboratories at Ben-Gurion University, working with the lab’s director, Prof. Yuval Elovici.

He is also an alumnus of the Technion Rothschild Excellence program.

He spent 2011-2013 as a post-doctoral researcher at MIT studying networks and the way they evolve and act as a medium which people use to interact. Together with Prof. Pentland he took part in the creation of the new science of Social Physics.[1]

Work

Altshuler’s research interests include machine intelligence, swarm systems, urban computing and collaborative security. He edited the book Security and Privacy in Social Networks,[2] and is a co-author on the book Swarms and Network Intelligence.[3]

In 2007 he has co-founded Memoraze, a start-up company in the field of behavior analysis in computer games.

His work on the way social networks can be used for improving financial trading returns,[4] known as “Network Tuning”, was the first to demonstrate how an efficient integration of a large number of insights from retail investors can significantly outperform the returns of professional investors,[5] as reported by Financial Times[6] and Harvard Business Review.[7]

Altshuler was also the leading researcher in the “Stealing Reality[8]” project that had shown how anonymized phone data can be used to accurately reveal personal information about the phone users, as well as the “Social Amplifier[9]” project, that demonstrated the usage of real-time analysis of billions of phone calls for homeland security. This research was covered by AOL news, PC World,[10] the Communications of the ACM, and other publications.

In 2014 he co-founded Endor, an MIT spinoff that uses Social Physics for an automatic on-demand prediction of consumer behaviors,[11] and provides answers to plain language business questions.[12] The company was funded among others by Eric Schmidt.

Altshuler has published over 60 academic papers,[13] and 15 patents.[14]

References
  1. Pentland, Alex (2015-01-01). Social physics how social networks can make us smarter. Penguin Books. ISBN 9780143126331. OCLC 935929407.
  2. Security and Privacy in Social Networks. ISBN 978-1493901227.
  3. Swarms and Network Intelligence in Search | Yaniv Altshuler | Springer. Studies in Computational Intelligence. Springer. 2018. ISBN 9783319636023.
  4. Duhaime-Ross, Arielle. "MIT's $1 million test to see if social media can make investors money". Quartz. Retrieved 2016-10-17.
  5. "Tuning Social Networks to Gain the Wisdom of the Crowd | MIT Media Lab". www.media.mit.edu. Retrieved 2016-10-20.
  6. "Markets Insight: Wake up to the #Twitter effect on markets". ft.com. Financial Times. 2013-04-18.
  7. "Beyond the Echo Chamber". Harvard Business Review. Retrieved 2016-10-17.
  8. Altshuler, Y.; Aharony, N.; Pentland, A.; Elovici, Y.; Cebrian, M. (2011-11-01). "Stealing Reality: When Criminals Become Data Scientists (or Vice Versa)". IEEE Intelligent Systems. 26 (6): 22–30. doi:10.1109/MIS.2011.78. ISSN 1541-1672.
  9. Altshuler, Yaniv; Fire, Michael; Shmueli, Erez; Elovici, Yuval; Bruckstein, Alfred; Pentland, Alex (Sandy); Lazer, David (2013-08-01). "The Social Amplifier—Reaction of Human Communities to Emergencies". Journal of Statistical Physics. 152 (3): 399–418. doi:10.1007/s10955-013-0759-z. hdl:1721.1/85200. ISSN 0022-4715.
  10. "Malware Aimed at Social Networks May Steal Your Reality". PCWorld. Retrieved 2016-10-17.
  11. Miller, Ron (Mar 8, 2017). "Endor emerges from MIT research with unique predictive analytics tech". TechCrunch.
  12. "Inventing the "Google" for predictive analytics". MIT News. Retrieved 2017-12-26.
  13. "Yaniv Altshuler - Google Scholar Citations". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 2016-10-17.
  14. "Yaniv Altshuler's Patents". Google.
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