Featured Researcher - Duncan Watts
Born in Guelph, Ontario, Duncan Watts spent his early life in Canada, Scotland, and Australia, including six years in the Royal Australian Navy, before moving to the US at the age of 22 to attend Graduate School.
These days, he’s a Yahoo! scientist currently on leave from Columbia University. He leads the Human Social Dynamics group at Yahoo! Research and is currently working on a variety of projects focused on social networks, diffusion processes, and recommendation systems.
We recently asked him a series of questions to find out more about the past, present, and future, and Duncan’s thoughts on life. Here’s what he had to say.
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
At first I wanted to be an astronaut, and then an astronomer. I always liked the stars, possibly because where I grew up—on a farm in southeast Queensland—you could see so many of them. But when I eventually got around to studying astronomy in college, I was surprised at how uninteresting I found it; so I had to think of something else.
What schools did you attend? What were your majors?
I went to high school at Toowoomba Grammar School, in Queensland Australia, and then to the Australian Defence Force Academy, where I majored in Physics, and also did my officer training. After a short stint in the Navy, I went to graduate school at Cornell, where I did my Ph.D. in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics.
What teacher had the greatest impact on you?
I had some great teachers in high school and college, but probably the most important influence on my thinking came from my graduate school advisor, Steve Strogatz, who spent an enormous amount of time talking with me not only about the various technical questions that came up in my research, but also discussing more philosophical matters of research and science in general. It was an incredibly formative period for me, and I’ve always been grateful for his guidance.
Where did you work prior to Yahoo?
Columbia University, where I was (and still am) a professor of sociology.
What has been the greatest challenge in your professional career?
Trying to do interdisciplinary work in an academic world that is very much defined by disciplinary boundaries. Everybody talks about the importance of bridging disciplines, but actually doing it is still difficult.
Why did you choose to work at Yahoo?
I see the frontier of social science—especially as it relates to the study of social networks—as being determined by the ability to measure the interactions between people, both at very large scales, and also in very fine-grained detail. Currently there are very few places in the world where such data is available, and Yahoo! is one of them. As (Head of Yahoo! Research) Prabhakar (Raghavan) likes to say, if you want to study particle physics, you need access to a cyclotron—well, Yahoo! is the cyclotron of social dynamics.
What do you like most about working at Yahoo?
It’s great to work with so many smart and friendly people, but I also really appreciate the atmosphere, which is surprisingly relaxed, given the intense focus on research.
If you could live in any other time, when might that be? And why?
It’s easy to romanticize the past, especially when one looks back on the lives of some of the great scientists; but I honestly don’t think there has been a time when someone like me has had greater opportunities, and more freedom to pursue them, than I do now. So although it’s tempting to think about what one could have done, say, in the early 18th century when the enlightenment was just gathering steam, or in the post-war era when all sorts of exciting things were happening in US science, I probably wouldn’t choose any time over the present.
Do you think technology has improved life for people?
Overall, yes. I think that the benefits of particular technological advances are often overstated, and new technologies also tend to bring with them new inequalities, whose costs are often overlooked. But if you look at human history over long enough timescales, I think it’s hard to make the argument that we would be better off turning the clock back.
What are you most proud of?
In the summer of 1996, two friends and I spent five days climbing “The Nose” of El Capitan—a 3,000 foot cliff in Yosemite Valley. It was physically the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and also psychologically the most challenging. I don’t climb much any more, but I think the lessons I learned about discipline, team work, and keeping one’s head under pressure continue to help me, even in the much less dangerous world of research.
What’s next for Duncan Watts?
Right now, my main focus is to build up the most innovative and exciting research group possible.
