For the past several years Fast Company magazine has named the 100 Most Creative People in Business. Past luminaries receiving this recognition include Ray Kurzweil, James Cameron, Oprah Winfrey, Jay-Z and many others. In 2011, Sitaram Asur (Ph.D., '09) made the list at #26.
Fast Company recognized Dr. Asur for the work he is currently doing with social media at HP Labs. He is deriving value information from the streams on Twitter and Facebook; i.e., what movies will be box-office successes on any given weekend. It comes from an algorithm he developed with Bernardo Huberman. He enjoys working with the new social media. He told the magazine, "I don't just sit in a lab closed away from the world. I like to be aware of what's happening around me."
As for winning the list placement, Sitaram says, "It feels absolutely wonderful. It is a great honor to be on this list with distinguished people from all over the world, many of whom I am a fan of."
Currently a researcher in the Social Computing Lab at HP Labs, he started there as a Postdoc as part of the 2009 NSF Computation Innovations Fellowship. At Ohio State, he was part of the Data Mining Research Lab, advised by Dr. Srinivasan Parthasarathy.