Manuel Cebrian

Research Group Leader (W2)
Digital Mobilization Group
Center for Humans and Machines

Phone: +49 30 82406-758
Email: cebrian@mpib-berlin.mpg.de

Contact: 
Katharina Genz 
Phone: +49 30 82406-753
Email: genz@mpib-berlin.mpg.de

Research interests

• Computational Social Science
• Network Science
• Crowdsourcing
• Disaster Management and Emergency Response

Short CV

• Research Scientist Manager, The Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Principal Research Scientist, Data61, CSIRO
• Assistant Research Scientist, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, San Diego
• Postdoctoral Associate, Telefonica Research
• Postdoctoral Associate, Department of Computer Science, Brown University
• PhD, Computer Science, 2007, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid

Updates

• Possibly one of the earliest studies (2011-14) of contact-tracing via mobile phones to fight epidemics ("Epidemic Contact Tracing via Communication Traces," PLoS ONE, 2014) anticipates many of the questions the world is confronting now.
• Nature Magazine's "The scientific events that shaped the decade" featuring Machine Behavior.
• Interview series on Machine Behavior released. 
• "Limits of Surveillance Capitalism," published in El Pais (Spanish.)
• BeeMe Experiment Documentary released, together with an accompanying essay. Winner, Best Scientific MicroDoc at 2020 Miami International Science Fiction Film Festival; Official Selection Laurel for the 2020 Florence Film Awards. 
• DeepAngel exhibited at Ars Electronica 2019. 

Selected Academic Publications

For a comprehensive list of publications, check Cebrian's Google Scholar profile, his Semantic Scholar profile, or his DBLP bibliography.

Crowdsourcing

• Time-critical social mobilization, G. Pickard, W. Pan, I. Rahwan, M. Cebrian, R. Crane, A. Madan, and A. Pentland, Science 334(6055):509-512 (2011). New York Times,  Rachel Madow ,  MSNBC,  Popular Mechanics ,  MIT News, IEEE Multimedia,  Science News .
• Reflecting on the DARPA Red Balloon Challenge, J. Tang, M. Cebrian, N. Giacobe, H-W. Kim, T. Kim, D. Wickert, Communications of the ACM 54(4):78-85 (2011).
• Finding red balloons with split contracts: robustness to individuals' selfishness, M. Cebrian, L. Coviello, A. Vattani, P. Voulgaris, Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC) pp. 775-788, New York, USA (2012). Talk video, Yaron Singer's Lecture Notes.
• Limits of social mobilization, A. Rutherford, M. Cebrian, S. Dsouza, E. Moro, A. Pentland, and I. Rahwan, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 110(16):6281-6286 (2013). NBC, Yahoo! News,  Arabian Gazette ,  La Repubblica.
• Error and attack tolerance of collective problem solving: The DARPA Shredder Challenge, N. Stefanovich, A. Alshamsi, M. Cebrian, I. Rahwan, EPJ Data Science 3:13 (2014). Medium,Nautilus,  CNET ,  San Diego Union-Tribune,  UC San Diego News I ,  UC San Diego News II,  KPBS ,  Phys.org, El Pais,  RTVE .
• Global manhunt pushes the limits of social mobilization, I. Rahwan, S. Dsouza, A. Rutherford, V. Naroditskiy, J. McInerney, M. Venanzi, N. Jennings, M. Cebrian, Computer 46(4):68-75 (2013). Scientific American,  MIT Technology Review ,  New Scientist,  Wired .
• Verification in Referral-Based Crowdsourcing, V. Naroditskiy, I. Rahwan, M. Cebrian, N. Jennings, PLoS ONE 7(10): e45924 (2012).
• Crowdsourcing contest dilemma, V. Naroditskiy, N. Jennings, P. Van Hentenryck, M. Cebrian, Journal of The Royal Society Interface 11:20140532 (2014). Social Physics Blog, The Australian, ABC Radio, Quartz, LifeHacker, The Conversation, University of Southampton.

Collective Digital Sensing

• Epidemic Contact Tracing via Communication Traces, K. Farrahi, R. Emonet, M. Cebrian, PLoS ONE 9(5): e95133 (2014).
• Predicting a community’s flu dynamics with mobile phone data. K. Farrahi, R. Emonet, M. Cebrian, CSCW '15 Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (2015).
• Efficient detection of contagious outbreaks in massive metropolitan encounter networks,  L. Sun, K.W., Axhausen,  D.-H. Lee, M. Cebrian, Scientific Reports 4, 5099 (2014)
• Using friends as sensors to detect global-scale contagious outbreaks, M. Garcia-Herranz, E. Moro, M. Cebrian, N. Christakis, J. Fowler, PLoS ONE 9(4):e92413 (2014).  MIT Technology Review ,  Yale University News,  Chronicle ,  Business Week, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid,  Huffington Post.
• Social sensing for epidemiological behavior change, A. Madan, M. Cebrian, D. Lazer, A. Pentland, Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp) pp. 291-300, Copenhagen, Denmark (2010). Ginger.io, Nature News.
• Weather impacts expressed sentiment, P. Baylis, N. Obradovich, Y. Kryvasheyeu, H. Chen, L. Coviello, E. Moro, M. Cebrian, J. Fowler, PLOS One 13(4): e0195750 (2018). Newsweek,  PLOS Research News ,  The Weather Channel,  Yahoo News ,  MIT Technology Review. 
• Rapid assessment of disaster damage using social media activity, Y. Kryvasheyeu, H. Chen, N. Obradovich, E. Moro, P. Van Hentenryck, J. Fowler, and M. Cebrian, Science Advances 2, e1500779 (2016). Science Magazine, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post,  Smithsonian ,  Michigan Daily,  Die Welt ,  Deutschlandfunk, Dagens Nyheter,  Science News ,  El Pais,  La Vanguardia ,  Altmetric. Dataset available at Dryad Digital Repository.
• Analyzing gender inequality through large-scale Facebook advertising data, D. Garcia, Y.M. Kassa, A. Cuevas, M. Cebrian, E. Moro, I. Rahwan, R. Cuevas, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 201717781 (2018). Scientific American,  El Pais . 
• Inferring mechanisms for global constitutional progress. A. Rutherford, Y. Lupu, M. Cebrian, I. Rahwan, B.L. LeVeck, et al. Nature Human Behaviour, 2 (8), 592 (2018).  Nature News ,  Constitutionology Interactive Microsite.
• Urban characteristics attributable to density-driven tie formation, W. Pan, G. Ghoshal, C. Krumme, M. Cebrian, and A. Pentland, Nature Communications 4, 1961 (2013). Featured in PNAS Core Concepts in Computational Social Science, The New York Times, The Atlantic Cities, The Economist,  Smithsonian ,  MIT News. See related work on Urban Crime, covered by CIO, and our analysis of the capacity of cities to Organize Social Events.

Human-Machine Cooperation

• Machine Behaviour I. Rahwan, M. Cebrian, N. Obradovich, J. Bongard, J.-F. Bonnefon, C. Breazeal, J. W. Crandall, N. A. Christakis, I. D. Couzin, M. O. Jackson, N. R. Jennings, E. Kamar, I. M. Kloumann, H. Larochelle, D. Lazer, R. McElreath, A. Mislove, D. C. Parkes, A. Pentland, M. E. Roberts, A. Shariff, J. B. Tenenbaum, M. Wellman (2019). Nature. 68, pages 477–486 [ paper , free read-only version] [Video interviews with some of the authors]. Selected Media: Forbes, Tech Target,  Media Lab on Medium , Technology Review, Information Age,  ZDNet , Süddeutsche Zeitung,  The Telegraph , Harvard Gazette [Machine Behavior Datathon.]
• Small cities face greater impact from automation, Frank, M. R., Sun, L., Cebrian, M., Youn, H., & Rahwan, I. (2018). Journal of the Royal Society Interface. 15(139). Visualization: Kellogg Insight. Video: EmTech Talk. Selected Media: MIT Technology Review, New Scientist, MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future.
• Cooperating with Machines , J. Crandall et al. Nature Communications, 9:233 (2018.) Video abstract.  Science Magazine, Science Daily,  La Repubblica , MIT Technology Review,  Le Monde .  Code: Comparison of algorithms |  S# .  Included in Nature Collection: The multidisciplinary nature of machine intelligence, Nature Human Behavior.
• The evolution of citation graphs in artificial intelligence research, M. Frank, D. Wang, M. Cebrian, I. Rahwan, Nature Machine Intelligence 1 (2), 79 (2019).  Kellog Insight.
• Toward understanding the impact of artificial intelligence on labor, M. Frank, D. Autor, J. Bessen, E. Brynjolfsson, M. Cebrian, D. Deming, M. Feldman, M. Groh, J. Lobo, E. Moro, D. Wang, H. Youn, Y. Rahwan. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 201900949 (2019).