Duncan Watts
· Stevens University Professor, Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions, Professor of Communication, Professor of Computer and Information ScienceUniversity of Pennsylvania · Design, Analysis and Management of Information Systems
Active 1998–2026
Academic metrics are sourced from OpenAlex and public funding records; values may differ from Google Scholar.
Research topics
- Computer Science
- Artificial Intelligence
- Machine Learning
- Data science
- Engineering
- Geography
- Management science
- Political Science
- Environmental resource management
- Environmental science
Selected publications
Computational social science: Obstacles and opportunities
Science · 2020 · 413 citations
Data sharing, research ethics, and incentives must improve
Integrating explanation and prediction in computational social science
Nature · 2021 · 357 citations
Measuring the predictability of life outcomes with a scientific mass collaboration
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2020 · 319 citations
How predictable are life trajectories? We investigated this question with a scientific mass collaboration using the common task method; 160 teams built predictive models for six life outcomes using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a high-quality birth cohort study. Despite using a rich dataset and applying machine-learning methods optimized for prediction, the best predictions were not very accurate and were only slightly better than those from a simple benchmark model.…
Misunderstanding the harms of online misinformation
Nature · 2024-06-05 · 121 citations
articleSenior authorQuantifying the impact of misinformation and vaccine-skeptical content on Facebook
Science · 2024-05-30 · 114 citations
articleLow uptake of the COVID-19 vaccine in the US has been widely attributed to social media misinformation. To evaluate this claim, we introduce a framework combining lab experiments (total N = 18,725), crowdsourcing, and machine learning to estimate the causal effect of 13,206 vaccine-related URLs on the vaccination intentions of US Facebook users ( N ≈ 233 million). We estimate that the impact of unflagged content that nonetheless encouraged vaccine skepticism was 46-fold greater than that of misi…
Frequent coauthors
- 59 shared
Jake M. Hofman
Microsoft (United States)
- 30 shared
M. E. J. Newman
University of Michigan–Ann Arbor
- 30 shared
Matthew Salganik
Princeton University
- 28 shared
Siddharth Suri
- 27 shared
Peter Sheridan Dodds
- 24 shared
Winter Mason
Menlo School
- 22 shared
Steven H. Strogatz
- 18 shared
David Rothschild
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