Professor Wilson’s research focuses on security and privacy for online social networks. His work begins with fundamental measurement and modeling of social networks and user dynamics. He then applies this knowledge to to build security and privacy-preserving systems that scale to today’s massive social networks. As part of this work, he developed a system for China’s largest social network that has successfully detected more than 1 million fake accounts in its first year of use.
His expertise extends to other aspects of the social web and to networks more broadly. He is working with Assistant Professor Alan Mislove to explore the Internet filter bubble, a term social scientists coined to describe the perils of content personalization on major websites. His interests also include examining ways to improve network protocols for data centers.
Professor Wilson joined the Northeastern faculty in 2012 after completing his PhD in computer science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received a Best Paper: Honorable Mention award at SIGCOMM 2011, and earned Masters and Bachelors degrees from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2007 and 2006, respectively.
