Christopher Homan

Associate Professor
Department of Computer Science
Rochester Institute of Technology
Rochester, NY 14623
Email: cmh
AT: cs.rit.edu
Phone: 585-475-6806

Ph.D., 2003 and M.S., 2000, Computer Science, University of Rochester
A.B., 1992, Mathematics, Cornell University

I study the computer-mediated processes through which communities come to better understand themselves and make decisions. My current interests include voting, sensemaking, and sampling from the perspectives of algorithms, networks, and software.

I am currently on sabbatical at the University of Rochester Medical Center Department of Psychiatry, where I am using social media to predict, affect, and use, as a computational resource, the viral processes associated with disease, mental illness, and communication.

Publications
(see below)

Teaching
Due to my sabbatical, I am not teaching any classes this quarter.

Links
  • Hand-drawn poster on the some of the computational aspects of representative democracy. This and the following poster may be a little too computer-science-y for some people.
  • Hand-drawn poster on heuristics for Lewis Carroll Elections. Cobbled together from slides for a talk I gave at MFCS 2006.
  • Some nice media for a graph visualization I coauthored.
  • A java applet for browsing Mandelbrot sets. This was originally a lab assignment for a CS for AP students class I taught.
  • A java applet for preferential voting from a list (>2) of choices.
Publication List
Journal Articles
  1. On the approximability of Dodgson and Young elections, Ioannis Caragiannis, Jason A. Covey, Michal Feldman, Christopher M. Homan, Christos Kaklamanis, Nikos Karanikolas, Ariel D. Procaccia, Jeffrey S. Rosenschein. Artif. Intell. 187: 31-51, 2012. [as .pdf]
  2. SOCIALSENSE: Graphical user interface design considerations for social network experiment software, N. Stupak, N. DiFonzo, A. Younge, C. Homan, Computers in Human Behavior, 26(3):365-370, 2010. [as .pdf]
  3. Connecting the invisible dots: Reaching lesbian, gay, and bisexual adolescents and young adults at risk for suicide through online social networks, V. Silenzio, P. Duberstein, W. Tang, N. Lu, X. Tu and C. Homan, Social Science & Medicine, 69(3):469-474, 2009. [as .pdf]
  4. Guarantees for the Success Frequency of an Algorithm for Finding Dodgson-Election Winners, C. Homan, L. Hemaspaandra, Journal of Heuristics,15(4):403-423, 2009. [tech report as .pdf | slides ]
  5. Cluster Computing and the Power of Edge Recognition, L. Hemaspaandra, C. Homan, S. Kosub, Information and Computation, 205(8):1274-1293, August 2007. [arxiv version]
  6. The Complexity of Computing the Size of an Interval, L. Hemaspaandra, C. Homan, S. Kosub, K. Wagner, SIAM Journal on Computing, 36(5):1264-1300, December 2006. [arxiv version]
  7. Lower Bounds on the Ambiguity of Strong, Total, Associative, One-Way Functions, C. Homan, Journal of Computer and System Sciences, 68(3):657-674, May 2004. [tech report version as .pdf]
  8. One-Way Permutations and Self-Witnessing Languages, C. Homan and M. Thakur, Journal of Computer and System Sciences, 67(3):608-622, November 2003. [as .pdf]
Conference Papers and Posters
  1. The ROC-CPT MSM Social Media Study: Designing Applications of Electronic Network Dynamics in HIV Prevention, Silenzio V, Brown B, Bekker LG, Batist E, Homan C, Bigham J, Batist E, Mufhandu K, Duby Z. World AIDS Day Scientific Symposium, University of Rochester Center for AIDS Research. Rochester, New York. December 1, 2011.
  2. "I heard that Democrats Abuse Drugs and Republicans are Racist," Network Segmentation and Group Segregation Effects on Self-Organization of Belief in Defensive and Non-Defensive Rumors, N. DiFonzo, M. Bourgeois, J. Suls, C. Homan, S. Brougher, A. Younge, N. Schwab, M. Frazee,and K. Harter, George Gerbner Conference on Communication, Conflict, and Aggression, Budapest, Hungary, May 28-29, 2010. [as .pdf]
  3. On the Approximability of Dodgson and Young Elections, I. Caragiannis, J. Covey, M. Feldman, C. Homan, C. Kaklamanis, N. Karanikolas, A. Procaccia, and J. Rosenschein, Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, SODA 2009, New York, NY, USA, January 4-6, 2009. [as .pdf]
  4. Dynamic social impact mechanisms in rumor propagation, N. DiFonzo, M. Bourgeois, C. Homan, J. Suls, B. Brooks, D. Ross, P. Bordia, N. Stupak, M. Frazee, S. Brougher, N. Schwab, M. McKinlay, Group Processes and Intergroup Relations Meeting at the 2008 Annual Conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, February 2008.
  5. Dichotomy Results for Fixed Point Counting in Boolean Dynamical Systems, S. Kosub, C. Homan, Proceedings of the 10th Italian Conference on Theoretical Computer Science, October 2007. [as .pdf]
  6. Guarantees for the Success Frequency of an Algorithm for Finding Dodgson- Election Winners, C. Homan, L. Hemaspaandra, 1st International Workshop on Compu- tational Social Choice, December 2006. [tech report as .pdf]
  7. Smoother Transitions between Breadth-First-Spanning-Tree-Based Drawings, C. Homan, A. Pavlo, and J. Schull, 14th Annual Symposium on Graph Drawing, September 2006. [as .pdf | related media]
  8. Guarantees for the Success Frequency of an Algorithm for Finding Dodgson-Election Winners, C. Homan, L. Hemaspaandra, Proceedings of the 31st International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science, August 2006. [tech report as .pdf]
  9. Cluster Computing and the Power of Edge Recognition, L. Hemaspaandra, C. Homan, S. Kosub, Third International Conference, TAMC 2006, Beijing, China, May 15-20, 2006, Proceedings, May 2006. [arxiv version]
  10. Physical Clearing Mechanisms in Power Industry, K. Atkins, C. Homan, A. Marathe, Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE PES Power Systems Conference and Exposition, October 2004. [as .pdf]
  11. Marketecture: A Simulation-Based Framework for Studying Experimental Deregulated Power Market, K. Atkins, C. Barrett, C. Homan, A. Marathe, M. Marathe, S. Thite, Proceedings of the 6th IAEE European Energy Conference, September 2004. [tech report as .pdf]
  12. Extracting Social Networks from Instant Messaging Populations, A. Teredesai, J. Resig, S. Dawara, C. Homan, Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGKDD Workshop on Link KDD, August 2004. [as .pdf]
  13. One-Way Permutations and Self-Witnessing Languages, C. Homan and M. Thakur, Proceedings of the 17th IFIP World Computer Congress/2nd IFIP International Conference on Theoretical Computer Science, pp. 243-254 , Kluwer Academic Publishers, August 2002. [journal version as .pdf]
Invited Paper
  1. One-Way Functions in Worst-Case Cryptography: Algebraic and Security Properties are on the House, A. Beygelzimer, L. Hemaspaandra, C. Homan, and J. Rothe, SIGACT News, V. 30, #4, pp. 25-40, December 1999. [as .pdf]