LinkedIn announced that Assistant Professor of Informatics and Computing YY Ahn and his team of Ph.D. students from the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, including Yizhi Jing, Adazeh Nematzadeh, Jaehyuk Park, and Ian Wood, is one of the 11 winners of the LinkedIn Economic Graph Challenge.
Their project, “Forecasting large-scale industrial evolution,” aims to understand the macro-evolution of industries to track businesses and emerging skills. This data would be used to forecast economic trends and guide professionals toward promising career paths.
"This is a fascinating opportunity to study the network of industries and people with unprecedented details and size. All of us are very excited to collaborate with LinkedIn and our LinkedIn mentor, Mike Conover, who is a recent Informatics PhD alumnus, on this topic," said Ahn.
LinkedIn's vision for the challenge is to create economic opportunity for the approximately three billion people in the global workforce. Through the Economic Graph Challenge, LinkedIn challenged researchers, academics, and data-driven thinkers to help solve some of the economic challenges facing the global workforce.
The Economic Graph is a digital mapping of the global economy that will include a profile for every member company in LinkedIn.
LinkedIn was overwhelmed by the responses to the challenge and accepted hundreds of applications, almost four times as many proposals as they had originally planned.
The proposals were evaluated for the novelty, impact, and feasibility.
The 11 winning teams–comprised mostly of entrants from prestigious universities–aim to solve problems as diverse as closing employee skill gaps, achieving municipal economic improvements and relieving inequality in the labor market. Their results could potentially positively impact millions of people.
Winners received $25,000. They have six months to conduct their research and will present their findings at LinkedIn headquarters in the fall.