Computer Scientist Yiling Chen wins NSF CAREER Award

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - January 12, 2010 - Yiling Chen, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, in the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), has won a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The honor is considered one of the most prestigious for up-and-coming researchers in science and engineering.

Chen's current research focuses on designing and analyzing social and organizational systems according to both economic and computational objectives.

Her specific interests include prediction markets and other information aggregation mechanisms, online advertising, auction theory and mechanisms design, algorithmic game theory, peer production, multi-agent systems, and web data mining.

The $461,798 CAREER Award will support her work on establishing the strategic and computational foundations for prediction markets so as to design market mechanisms that are not only theoretically sound but also practically applicable for information aggregation in complex real-world settings.

Chen received a Ph.D. in Information Sciences and Technology from Pennsylvania State University, University Park; a Master of Economics from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China; and a Bachelor of Economics from Renmin University, Beijing, China.

Prior to Chen's appointment at Harvard, she was a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research, and served as a Teaching/Research Assistant at various institutions, including Pennsylvania State University, Iowa State University, and Tsinghua University.

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