David Liben-Nowell

I'm a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Carleton College. In September 2022, I joined the Provost's Office at Carleton, for a few-year stint as an Associate Provost.

My interests are focused on computational social sciences, particularly the structure and evolution of social networks and computational modeling of spoken-word recognition. I'm also generally interested in the application of theoretical computer science to problems in a variety of other areas, within and beyond computer science; I've worked on problems in computational biology, complexity of games, and peer-to-peer systems.

Other interests, just because: Adam Gopnik, Churchill College, coffeeshops, Cornell, Cornell hockey, Cornell hockey, cricket, crossword puzzles (solving and writing), curling, donuts, Eddie From Ohio, The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky, Harry Chapin, Kris Delmhorst, the Magnetic Fields, learning Yiddish, making lists, Quite Interesting, punting (see also someone who's learned a few of my tricks), Richard Russo, road biking, Says You!, ultimate, web pages that look like they were built in 1996.

A textbook: Connecting Discrete Mathematics and Computer Science

Summer 2022 Teaching:

• History of Computing in England (off-campus studies program)
  CS 301 History of Computing; CS 341 Cryptography; IDSC 141 Turing, Gender & Computing; HIST 145 World War II History.
• The Summer 2022 program ran from June 2022 through late August 2022.
• Interested in a future iteration? I'd love to chat!

Research:

• Recent papers:
  • David Liben-Nowell, Anna N. Rafferty. Student Motivations and Goals for CS1: Themes and Variations. SIGCSE'22, March 2022.
  • Patty Commins, David Liben-Nowell, Tina Liu, Kiran Tomlinson. Summarizing Diverging String Sequences, with Applications to Chain-Letter Petitions. Combinatorial Pattern Matching 2020 (CPM'20) June 2020.
  • David Liben-Nowell, Julia Strand, Alexa Sharp, Tom Wexler, Kevin Woods. The Danger of Testing by Selecting Controlled Subsets, with Applications to Spoken-Word Recognition. Journal of Cognition, January 2019.
  • Violet Brown, Xi Chen, Maryam Hedayati, Camden Sikes, Julia Strand, Tegan Wilson, David Liben-Nowell. Node Ordering for Rescalable Network Summarization (or, the Apparent Magic of Word Frequency and Age of Acquisition in the Lexicon). Complex Networks 2018.
  • Justin Cheng, Jon Kleinberg, Jure Leskovec, David Liben-Nowell, Bogdan State, Karthik Subbian, Lada Adamic. Do Diffusion Protocols Govern Cascade Growth? ICWSM 2018.
  
  
• Complete list of publications by topic or by year.
  
  

Letters of Recommendation:

FAQ:

• Q: Hey you! What should I call you?
  A: "David" will do quite nicely, thank you very much. "Dave" is a perfectly fine name, but Dave ain't me. (Thanks to Charles Leiserson for the FAQ idea.)
• Q: Hey you! I'd rather call you Professor/Doctor Liben-Nowell. How is that pronounced?
  A: It's pronounced many different ways, but the correct one rhymes with "ribbon towel."

Contact information: