Sadly, I was not born with a sensical one-word last name, leading to various problems throughout life. For googling purposes, the all-too-common misspellings: GV Steeg Greg Steeg Greg VerSteeg

Next month on April 9 I’ll give a talk for UC Irvine’s AI/ML seminar. The next week I’ll fly to Lyon, France for WWW (the World Wide Web conference). I’ll be giving a talk at a workshop before WWW called “Making sense of micro posts”. Then I’ll present my and Aram Galstyan‘s paper “Information Transfer in [...]

I’m teaching a graduate course this term at USC with Aram Galstyan called “Physics and Computation”. Basically, it shows how we can use statistical physics to understand problems in computer science. Hopefully I’ll post some details about the class later.  For now, here’s the main text we’re using: Information, computation, and physics. In a classic [...]

I finally have a working paper up called Information transfer in social media, related to the talk I gave at WIN. Read on for a quick explanation. Neurons in the brain give sporadic electrical spikes. How does the pattern of neuronal spikes correspond to a thought? Or, how are our thoughts coded as electrical spikes? [...]

UAI 2011 has ended, and it went really well. I was happy with my talk and surprised at how many people at UAI were interested in quantum stuff! There were many interesting presentations but I want to mention one in particular because it’s on my mind and it has a nice connection to my talk. [...]

I’m happy to unveil a new paper, “A sequence of relaxations constraining hidden variable models”. Depending on your interests, I’m including two different overviews. One comes from the social networks perspective and the other from the quantum physics perspective. Fundamentally, they are both about detecting hidden variables. I’ll be giving a plenary talk about this [...]

My ISI web page got moved to a new framework, so it could get integrated with our group web page more easily. After several hours of work, the result is marginally better looking than my old web page.

I’m giving a talk at USC on May 20 for the quantum information and condensed matter physics seminar. It will be about phase transitions in the graph partitioning problem along with wild speculation about the implications for adiabatic quantum computation. I’m also going to the International Conference on Complex Systems this summer, talking about the [...]

The last Big Bang Theory episode was about information diffusion in social networks. The science consultant for the show asked my colleague Kristina Lerman to write about the topic for the Big Bang Theory blog. She mentions our recent paper (previous post). Unfortunately, although she gave the science consultant some of our graphs to put [...]

I have a new revision available on arxiv of the paper What stops social epidemics? I’ll be presenting the paper at ICWSM 2011 in Barcelona. How likely is it for a virus or piece of information to spread through a network? If, on average, each person spreads the virus to more than one person than [...]