2014-2016 WRF and Moore/Sloan Postdoctoral Fellow, Statistics

Alumni

Specializations
Informatics, Social Sciences, Statistics

Thiago Costa was a Moore/Sloan Data Science and WRF Innovation in Data Science Postdoctoral Fellow from 2014-2016. 

Biography

Department of Statistics

UW mentors 
Tyler McCormick, Statistics and Sociology

Joshua Blumenstock, Information School

Education history 
Ph.D., Applied Mathematics, Harvard Univ., 2014
M.S., Mathematics, Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IMPA), Brazil, 2008
B.S., Computer Engineering, State Univ. of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil, 2006

Research goals 
Thiago Costa was a WRF Moore/Sloan Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Statistics from 2014 through fall 2016. Thiago Costa’s research centers on applications of Statistics and Network Science to Social Sciences with a focus on exploring massive relational and temporal datasets, such as telecommunications and social networks datasets. During his Ph.D., he worked with a mathematical theory that describes limiting properties of very large networks and developed a scalable inferential framework to explore applicable aspects of this theory.

Now, he is trying to adapt the theory to solve useful real world problems. Some of the applicable perspectives he is exploring are the possibility of developing measures to classify and compare individuals inside the topology of the network so we identify structural network changes over time both in an individual and on a global level. This can be used for instance to model political identity of individuals and news sources in a social network, or to identify and classify real world events by looking at structural changes in a telecommunication network.