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Dr. Marian-Andrei Rizoiu is lecturer with the University of Technology Sydney, leading the Behavioral Data Science group, studying the dynamics of human attention in the online environment. His research has made several key contributions, particularly to the areas of online popularity prediction and online privacy. For the past several years, he has been developing theoretical models for online information diffusion, which can account for complex social phenomena, such as the rise and fall of online popularity, the spread of misinformation or the adoption of disruptive technologies. He approached questions such as "Why did X become popular, but not Y?" and "How can items be promoted?" with implications in advertising and marketing. Marian-Andrei has also worked on detecting the evolution of privacy loss over time. His research has shown that privacy "leaks" over time and it identified the factors causing the loss: the individual's own actions and the environment. The conclusions were staggering: privacy continues to decrease even for users who retired from activity. Marian-Andrei published in the most selective venues of the field (such as WWW, WSDM, ICWSM or CIKM) and his work has received significant media attention, including from the Wikimedia Foundation for the work concerning the privacy of Wikipedia editors (which featured in the March 2016 Wikimedia Research Showcase). See more at https://www.rizoiu.eu.

We spent six years scouring billions of links, and found the web is both expanding and shrinking

More than a quarter of a century since its first commercial use, the growth of the online world is now slowing down in some key categories. A multi-year research project analyzing global trends in online diversity and dominance conducted by Paul X. McCarthy and Marian-Andrei Rizoiu reveals a dramatic consolidation of attention towards a shrinking (but increasingly dominant) group of online organizations. So, while there is still growth in the functions, features and applications offered on the web, the number of entities providing these functions is shrinking.

Subjects: Internet Trends, KM, Privacy, Social Media