Alex Fabrikant (N.B.: permanent forwarding address) This academic homepage is for those interested in my research work. I do not speak for my employer here.

Bio

I am a staff research scientist at Google Research, leading a team that focuses on scalable cross-document natural language understanding. We are always excited to hear from prospective collaborators, applicants, and interns!

Over my time at Google, I've also worked on spatiotemporal data mining and location privacy, and on social network mining. I received my Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, working on lower bounds in algorithmic game theory and applications to network modeling, with Christos Papadimitriou. My bachelor's degrees in electrical engineering&computer science, linguistics, and math are also from Berkeley.

Papers

Natural Language Processing (2021-)

• Sihao Chen, Senaka Buthpitiya, Alex Fabrikant, Dan Roth, Tal Schuster. PropSegmEnt: A Large-Scale Corpus forProposition-Level Segmentation and Entailment Recognition. Pre-print, 2022.
• Tal Schuster, Sihao Chen, Senaka Buthpitiya, Alex Fabrikant, Donald Metzler. Stretching Sentence-pair NLI Models to Reason over Long Documents and Clusters. In Findings of EMNLP, 2022.
• James Cook, Atish Das Sarma, Alex Fabrikant, and Andrew Tomkins. Your Two Weeks of Fame and Your Grandmother's. In Proc. of WWW 2012.

Geospatial data mining and privacy (2013-2020)

• Gregory A. Wellenius et al. (co-first author) Impacts of social distancing policies on mobility and COVID-19 case growth in the US. In Nature Communications, 2021.
• Liana R Woskie et al. Early social distancing policies in Europe, changes in mobility & COVID-19 case trajectories: Insights from Spring 2020. In PLoS One, 2021.
• Ahmet Aktay et al. Google COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports: Anonymization Process Description. Pre-print, 2020. Recognized with a Future of Privacy Forum Research Data Stewardship Award, 2021.
• Shailesh Bavadekar et al. Google COVID-19 Search Trends Symptoms Dataset: Anonymization Process Description. Pre-print, 2020
• Yuyan Wang, Senaka Buthpitiya, Alex Fabrikant. Zebra regression: estimating motion of periodically-emitted particles from unlabeled sightings. In Proc of ACM SIGSPATIAL 2022.
• Richard Barnes, Senaka Buthpitiya, James Cook, Alex Fabrikant, Andrew Tomkins, Fangzhou Xu. BusTr: Predicting Bus Travel Times from Real-Time Traffic. In Proc. KDD 2020.
• Georg Osang, James Cook, Alex Fabrikant, Marco Gruteser. LiveTraVeL: Real-time matching of transit vehicle trajectories to transit routes at scale. In Proc. IEEE ITSC 2019.

Social network mining (2011-2012)

• Lujun Fang, Alex Fabrikant, Kristen LeFevre. "Look Who I Found: Understanding the Effects of Sharing Curated Friend Groups". In ACM WebScience 2012; recognized with a Best Student Paper award.
• Shaomei Wu, Atish Das Sarma, Alex Fabrikant, Silvio Lattanzi, Andrew Tomkins. Arrival and departure dynamics in social networks. In Proc. WSDM 2013.
• James Cook, Alex Fabrikant, Avinatan Hassidim. How to grow more pairs: suggesting review targets for comparison-friendly review ecosystems. In Proc. WWW 2013
• Alex Fabrikant, Mohammad Mahdian, Andrew Tomkins. SCRank: Spammer and Celebrity Ranking in Directed Social Networks. Pre-print, 2018.

Algorithmic game theory and network modeling (2002-2010)

• Roee Engelberg, Alex Fabrikant, Michael Schapira, David Wajc. Best-Response Dynamics Out of Sync: Complexity and Characterization. In Proc of ACM EC 2013.
• Alex Fabrikant, Umar Syed, and Jennifer Rexford, There's something about MRAI: Timing diversity exponentially worsens BGP convergence. In Proc. of INFOCOM 2011.
• Martin Suchara, Alex Fabrikant, and Jennifer Rexford, BGP Safety with Spurious Updates. In Proc. of INFOCOM 2011.
  • Technical report (Princeton CS, TR-881-10): [ PDF ]
• Alex Fabrikant, Aaron Jaggard, and Michael Schapira, On the Structure of Weakly Acyclic Games. In Proc. of SAGT 2010.
• Minlan Yu, Alex Fabrikant, and Jennifer Rexford, BUFFALO: Bloom filter forwarding architecture for large organizations, In Proc. of CoNEXT 2009, pages 313-324.
• Alex Fabrikant, The Complexity of Game Dynamics, Ph.D. Dissertation, UC Berkeley, 2008.
• Alex Fabrikant and Christos Papadimitriou, The complexity of game dynamics: BGP oscillations, sink equlibria, and beyond, In Proc. of SODA 2008, pages 844-853.
• Constantinos Daskalakis, Alex Fabrikant, and Christos Papadimitriou, The Game World is Flat: The Complexity of Nash Equilibria in Succinct Games, In Proc. of ICALP 2006, pages 513-524.
• Alex Fabrikant, Christos Papadimitriou, and Kunal Talwar, "The Complexity of Pure Nash Equilibria". In Proc. of STOC 2004, pages 604-612.
• Alex Fabrikant, Ankur Luthra, Elitza Maneva, Christos H. Papadimitriou, and Scott Shenker, "On a Network Creation Game.". In Proc. of 2003 PODC, pages 347-351.
• Alex Fabrikant, Elias Koutsoupias, and Christos H. Papadimitriou, "Heuristically Optimized Trade-offs: A New Paradigm for Power Laws in the Internet". In Proc. of 2002 ICALP, pages 110-122. Springer-Verlag LNCS, 2002.

• Alex Fabrikant, Tad Hogg, "Graph Coloring with Quantum Heuristics". In Proc. of 2002 AAAI, pages 22-27. AAAI, 2002.