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Biography

Tim Althoff is an Assistant Professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Information School at the University of Washington. His research advances computational methods to improve human well-being, combining techniques from Data Mining, Social Network Analysis, and Natural Language Processing.
Tim holds Ph.D. and M.S. degrees from the Computer Science Department at Stanford University, where he worked with Jure Leskovec. Prior to his PhD, Tim obtained M.S. and B.S. degrees from the University of Kaiserslautern, Germany. He has received several fellowships and awards including the SAP Stanford Graduate Fellowship, Fulbright scholarship, German Academic Exchange Service scholarship, the German National Merit Foundation scholarship, and a Best Paper Award by the International Medical Informatics Association. Tim’s research has been covered internationally by news outlets including BBC, CNN, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times.

Education

  • Ph D, Computer Science, Stanford University, 2018
  • MS, Computer Science, Stanford University, 2015
  • MS, Computer Science, University of Kaiserslautern, 2013
  • BS, Computer Science, University of Kaiserslautern, 2013

Awards

  • #1 most tweeted JMIR article 2016; #4 most tweeted JMIR article all time, 2017
  • Altmetric Top 100 Article 2017 - Altmetric, 2017
  • Best Paper Award – Clinical Natural Language Processing 2016, 2017

Publications and Contributions

  • Journal Article, Academic Journal
    Best practices for analyzing large-scale health data from wearables and smartphone apps (2019)
    NPJ digital medicine, Volume 2, Issue 1, Page 45 Authors: Jennifer L Hicks, Tim Althoff, Peter Kuhar, Bojan Bostjancic, Abby C King, Jure Leskovec, Scott L Delp, others
  • Conference Paper
    Goal-setting And Achievement In Activity Tracking Apps: A Case Study Of MyFitnessPal (2019)
    The World Wide Web Conference, Page 571--582 Authors: Mitchell Gordon, Tim Althoff, Jure Leskovec
  • Journal Article, Academic Journal
    The menstrual cycle is a primary contributor to cyclic variation in women's mood, behavior, and vital signs (2019)
    BioRxiv, Page 583153 Authors: Emma Pierson, Tim Althoff, Daniel Thomas, Paula Hillard, Jure Leskovec
  • Conference Paper
    I'll Be Back: On the Multiple Lives of Users of a Mobile Activity Tracking Application (2018)
    Proceedings of the 2018 World Wide Web Conference, Page 1501--1511 Authors: Zhiyuan Lin, Tim Althoff, Jure Leskovec
  • Conference Paper
    Modeling individual cyclic variation in human behavior (2018)
    Proceedings of the 2018 World Wide Web Conference, Page 107--116 Authors: Emma Pierson, Tim Althoff, Jure Leskovec
  • Conference Paper
    Modeling interdependent and periodic real-world action sequences (2018)
    Proceedings of the 2018 World Wide Web Conference, Page 803--812 Authors: Takeshi Kurashima, Tim Althoff, Jure Leskovec
  • Journal Article, Academic Journal
    Psychomotor function measured via online activity predicts motor vehicle fatality risk (2018)
    NPJ Digital Medicine, Volume 1, Issue 1, Page 20173 Authors: Tim Althoff, Eric Horvitz, Ryen W White
  • Sleep monitoring from implicitly collected computer interactions (2018)
    Authors: Tim Althoff, Eric J Horvitz, Ryen W White
  • Conference Paper
    Harnessing the web for population-scale physiological sensing: A case study of sleep and performance (2017)
    Proceedings of the 26th international conference on World Wide Web, Page 113--122 Authors: Tim Althoff, Eric Horvitz, Ryen W White, Jamie Zeitzer
  • Conference Paper
    How gamification affects physical activity: Large-scale analysis of walking challenges in a mobile application (2017)
    Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web Companion, Page 455--463 Authors: Ali Shameli, Tim Althoff, Amin Saberi, Jure Leskovec
  • Journal Article, Academic Journal
    Large-scale physical activity data reveal worldwide activity inequality (2017)
    Nature, Volume 547, Issue 7663, Page 336 Authors: Tim Althoff, Jennifer L Hicks, Abby C King, Scott L Delp, Jure Leskovec, others
  • Conference Paper
    Online actions with offline impact: How online social networks influence online and offline user behavior (2017)
    Proceedings of the tenth ACM international conference on web search and data mining, Page 537--546 Authors: Tim Althoff, Pranav Jindal, Jure Leskovec
  • Journal Article, Academic Journal
    Population-scale pervasive health (2017)
    IEEE pervasive computing, Volume 16, Issue 4, Page 75--79 Author: Tim Althoff
  • Journal Article, Academic Journal
    Influence of Pokemon Go on physical activity: study and implications (2016)
    Journal of Medical Internet research, Volume 18, Issue 12, Page e315 Authors: Tim Althoff, Ryen W White, Eric Horvitz
  • Journal Article, Academic Journal
    Large-scale analysis of counseling conversations: An application of natural language processing to mental health (2016)
    Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 4, Page 463--476 Authors: Tim Althoff, Kevin Clark, Jure Leskovec
  • Conference Proceeding
    Donor retention in online crowdfunding communities: A case study of donorschoose. org (2015)
    Proceedings of the 24th international conference on world wide web, Page 34--44 Authors: Tim Althoff, Jure Leskovec
  • Conference Proceeding
    TimeMachine: timeline generation for knowledge-base entities (2015)
    Proceedings of the 21th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, Page 19--28 Authors: Tim Althoff, Xin Luna Dong, Kevin Murphy, Safa Alai, Van Dang, Wei Zhang
  • Conference Proceeding
    How to ask for a favor: A case study on the success of altruistic requests (2014)
    Eighth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media Authors: Tim Althoff, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Dan Jurafsky
  • Conference Proceeding
    Analysis and forecasting of trending topics in online media streams (2013)
    Proceedings of the 21st ACM international conference on Multimedia, Page 907--916 Authors: Tim Althoff, Damian Borth, Hees, J\"orn, Andreas Dengel