CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Chowdhary, Sandeep |
|---|---|
| Title | Quantifying success in individual and team careers in intellectual domains |
| Summary | Human progress is driven by actions of successful individuals. For this reason, quantifying patterns and habits of success in major human endeavors is a key challenge in computational social science. Yet, its quantification is often challenging due to its subjective nature, and the lack of fine-grained data about human performance. The recent availability of large scale datasets in a variety of social contexts-- from Science to Businesses and Sports-- presents an opportunity for success to be rigorously quantified. The first part of this thesis explores temporal patterns of success in individual careers. First, I unveil how social network and collaboration structure determines funding success of scientists in academia. Furthering our data-driven approaches to sports, I delve into the evolution of chess careers, tracking the career trajectories of successful chess players, and their temporal evolution. Beyond single individuals, I then move on characterizing success in teams. Focusing on publication data, I extract persistent collaborations and extend the investigation of scientific careers from single scientists to team trajectories. I investigate how persistent collaborations emergence and eventually dissolve, and which compositional factors make some teams more successful than others. Lastly, I explore the spread of ideas and innovations through social contagion modeling, highlighting the importance of group contagion and temporal persistence in shaping population-level spread of ideas. By quantifying patterns success across careers in different domains, this thesis contributes to the evolving discourse on successful careers and their correlates. |
| Supervisor | Battiston, Federico |
| Department | Network Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/chowdhary_sandeep.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University