Kleinberg shares perspectives in Technology Research News

An interview with Jon Kleinberg appeared in the December 5, 2005, issue of Technology Research News. The interview shared Kleinbergs perspectives on trends in the industry, the importance of research that studies network data, network growth, and network evolution, and the technological, social, and economic implications of the structure of the Web.

Kleinberg also shared insights into the important social questions related to today's cutting-edge technologies.

The information we process every day will become increasingly varied, complicated, and voluminous; and since it's already at the limit of our cognitive abilities, something has to give: we will either develop tools that can manage this information for us more effectively, or we will develop new styles of dealing with it.

As a consequence of these developments, we are accumulating incredibly detailed datasets of human activity on-line -- the way people author content on the Web, the way they browse and read information, and the way they communicate with one another. This is inevitable; personal information streams create enormous archives, and significant aspects of people's lives are encoded in these archives.

We face two challenges here: how to make sense of data at this resolution, and how to ensure people's privacy in a world where this kind of data exists. But if we can overcome these challenges, we'll have much better insight into how to make on-line tools better conform to the ways in which people read, write, search, and communicate --- and more generally how to design on-line tools for a world in which people are increasingly dependent on them.

For the complete interview, visit http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2005/120505/View_Jon_Kleinberg_120505.html.