Jure Leskovec is a Slovenian computer scientist, entrepreneur and associate professor of Computer Science at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

focusing on networks. He was the chief scientist at

Pinterest Pinterest is an American image sharing and social media service designed to enable saving and discovery of information (specifically "ideas") on the internet using images, and on a smaller scale, animated GIFs and videos, in the form of pinboard ...

Early life and education

In 2004, Leskovec received a Diploma in Computer Science from the

University of Ljubljana The University of Ljubljana ( sl, Univerza v Ljubljani, , la, Universitas Labacensis), often referred to as UL, is the oldest and largest university in Slovenia. It has approximately 39,000 enrolled students. History Beginnings Although certain ...

Slovenia Slovenia ( ; sl, Slovenija ), officially the Republic of Slovenia (Slovene: , abbr.: ''RS''), is a country in Central Europe. It is bordered by Italy to the west, Austria to the north, Hungary to the northeast, Croatia to the southeast, an ...

, researching semantic networks-based creation of abstracts, using machine learning; in 2008 he received a PhD in Computational and Statistical Learning from the Carnegie Mellon University. After finishing his PhD, Leskovec worked as a postdoctoral fellow at

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...

for a year. During this time, he was advised by

Jon Kleinberg Jon Michael Kleinberg (born 1971) is an American computer scientist and the Tisch University Professor of Computer Science and Information Science at Cornell University known for his work in algorithms and networks. He is a recipient of the Nevanl ...

Research and career

After his postdoctoral stint at Cornell University, Leskovec joined the faculty of Stanford University as an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science in 2009. He was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2016. His general research area is applied machine learning and data science for large interconnected systems. His work focuses on modeling complex, richly-labeled relational structures, graphs, and networks for systems at all scales, from interactions of proteins in a cell to interactions between humans in a society. His research finds applications in a variety of settings including commonsense reasoning, recommender systems, computational social science, and computational biology with an emphasis on drug discovery. Leskovec co-founded a startup called Kosei in 2014 that was acquired by Pinterest in 2015.

Awards and honors

Microsoft Research Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technologi ...

Faculty Fellowship, 2011. * Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, 2012. *

Lagrange Prize The Lagrange-CRT Foundation Prize is an annual International award created by the CRT Foundation with the scientific coordination of the ISI Foundation. The prize is awarded for scientific research in the field of complexity sciences, its appl ...

, 2015.

Select publications

* * *

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Leskovec, Jure Living people Slovenian computer scientists Slovenian academics Sloan Research Fellows Stanford University faculty University of Ljubljana alumni Year of birth missing (living people) Network scientists Pinterest people