Christo Wilson is an assistant professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. Professor Wilson received his PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara working under Ben Y. Zhao. He was the recipient of the Outstanding Dissertation Award from UCSB in 2012, and received a Best Paper Award at SIGCOMM in 2011. His work is funded by the National Science Foundation, Verisign, the Data Transparency Lab, and the Knight Foundation.
Professor Wilson performed the first large-scale measurements of the Facebook social network in 2008 to understand how users form friendships and interact. These insights about the behavior of normal people enabled Professor Wilson to develop novel techniques for combating spam and fake accounts on social networks, even when the attacks are perpetrated by real people instead of automated software bots. These techniques have been successfully deployed on LinkedIn and Renren (Facebook in China). To date, Professor Wilson has shared anonymized social network datasets to over 500 research groups around the world, and continues to open-source the code and data from his work examining algorithms and personalization on the Web.
Professor Wilson helped organize the first annual ACM Conference on Online Social Networks (COSN), and continues to serve on the program committees for several conferences, including WWW, IMC, and ICWSM. His work has been covered extensively in the press, including the CBS Evening News, Good Morning America, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, and the Washington Post.