Cornell University · Department of Information Science

Yangfanyu Yang 楊 陽 笵 宇

Ph.D. student studying how knowledge ages, accumulates, and spreads — through the lenses of network science, computational social science, and the science of science.

I.

About

I am a first-year Ph.D. student in Information Science at Cornell, advised by Yian Yin, with a special committee that includes Jon Kleinberg and Rene Kizilcec.

My research treats science as a complex system: I build network models and large-scale empirical analyses to understand how careers, citations, and ideas evolve over time — and what drives the inequalities that emerge along the way.

Before Cornell, I read Mathematics at St John's College, Cambridge and completed an M.S. in Statistics at the National University of Singapore.

II.

Education

  1. 2024–

    Cornell University

    Ph.D. student, Information Science.

    Committee: Yian Yin, Jon Kleinberg, Rene Kizilcec.

  2. 2025

    St John's College, University of Cambridge

    M.A. (Cantab)

  3. 2024

    National University of Singapore

    M.S., Statistics.

  4. 2021

    St John's College, University of Cambridge

    B.A., Mathematics.

III.

Publications & Working Papers

  1. working paper

    Quantifying Ageing Effects in Innovative Careers

    Yangfanyu Yang, supervised by Yian Yin.

    Presented at the International Conference on the Science of Science and Innovation (ICSSI 2025); the International Conference on Complex Networks and their Applications (Complex Networks 2025); and the International School & Conference on Network Science (NetSci 2026).

  2. under review

    Benchmark Datasets for Lead–Lag Forecasting on Social Platforms

    Kimia Kazemian, Zhenzhen Liu, Yangfanyu Yang, Katie Z. Luo, Shuhan Gu, Moyun Du, Xinyu Yang, Jack Jansons, Kilian Q. Weinberger, John Thickstun, Yian Yin, Sarah Dean.

    Submitted to SIGKDD 2026.

  3. journal

    Information Dissemination with Service-Oriented Incentive Mechanism in Industrial Internet of Things

    Yinxue Yi, Yangfanyu Yang, Kefei Cheng, Yu Wu, Xiaokang Wang.

    IEEE Internet of Things Journal, vol. 9, no. 18, pp. 16897–16907, 2022.   doi:10.1109/jiot.2022.3147840

IV.

Research Experience

  1. 2021

    Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications

    Research Assistant · School of Communication & Information Engineering · remote

    Information Dissemination with Service-Oriented Incentive Mechanism. Co-authored an IEEE IoT Journal paper modelling how incentives shape information spread in industrial IoT networks, including simulation and stochastic analysis of the device-level dynamics.

  2. 2017

    Bulgarian Academy of Sciences · American University in Bulgaria

    Summer Research School in Mathematics & Informatics · Sofia / Blagoevgrad

    Predicting the Existence of Dark Matter in the Virgo Cluster. Estimated virial masses and luminosities of cluster galaxies to test for missing-mass signatures, with guidance from Nikola Karavasilev.