News

04.10.24 – Today I started a new position at Flatiron Health!
04.04.24 – I will be at WebSci'24 in Stuttgart, Germany this May, presenting two papers on behalf of Spotify. My colleague, Ben Lacker, will present work at ICWSM'24 in Buffalo, New York, shortly after in June.

Publications

Exploring Local Music's Place in Global Streaming Samuel F. Way, Dominika Mazur, Rebecca Kupferman, Megan Walsh, Angelina Tizé, and Ben Lacker Proc. ACM Int'l Conf. on Web Science (WebSci), 2024

A Genre-Based Analysis of New Music Streaming at Scale Julie Jiang, Aditya Ponnada, Ang Li, Ben Lacker, and Samuel F. Way Proc. ACM Int'l Conf. on Web Science (WebSci), 2024

Socially-motivated Music Recommendation Ben Lacker and Samuel F. Way Proc. Int'l Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), 2024

Time after Time: Longitudinal Trends in Nostalgic Listening Clara Hanson, Jesse Anderton, Samuel F. Way, Ian Anderson, Scott Wolf, and Alice Wang Proc. Int'l Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), 2022

The Dynamics of Exploration on Spotify Lillio Mok, Samuel F. Way, Lucas Maystre, and Ashton Anderson Proc. Int'l Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), 2022

TastePaths: Enabling Deeper Exploration and Understanding of Personal Preferences in Recommender Systems Savvas Petridis, Nediyana Daskalova, Sarah Mennicken, Samuel F. Way, Paul Lamere, and Jennifer Thom Proc. Int'l Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI), 2022

The Unequal Impact of Parenthood in Academia Allison C. Morgan, Samuel F. Way, Michael J. D. Hoefer, Mirta Galesic, Daniel B. Larremore, and Aaron Clauset Science Advances, 2021

Towards Fairness in Practice: A Practitioner-Oriented Rubric for Evaluating Fair ML Toolkits Brianna Richardson, Jean Garcia-Gathright, Samuel F. Way, Jennifer Thom, and Henriette Cramer Proc. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2021

Local Trends in Global Music Streaming Samuel F. Way, Jean Garcia-Gathright, and Henriette Cramer Proc. Int'l Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), 2020

Productivity, prominence, and the effects of academic environment Samuel F. Way, Allison C. Morgan, Daniel B. Larremore, and Aaron Clauset PNAS 201817431, 2019

Environmental Changes and the Dynamics of Musical Identity Samuel F. Way, Santiago Gil, Ian Anderson, and Aaron Clauset Proc. Int'l Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), 2019

Prestige drives epistemic inequality in the diffusion of scientific ideas Allison C. Morgan, Dimitrios Economou, Samuel F. Way, and Aaron Clauset EPJ Data Science 7:40, 2018

Automatically assembling a full census of an academic field Allison C. Morgan, Samuel F. Way, and Aaron Clauset PLOS One 13(8): e0202223, 2018

Network assembly of scientific communities of varying size and specificity Daniel Citron and Samuel F. Way Journal of Informetrics 12.1: 181-190, 2018

The misleading narrative of the canonical faculty productivity trajectory Samuel F. Way, Allison C. Morgan, Aaron Clauset, and Daniel B. Larremore PNAS 114(44): E9216-E9223, 2017. Presented at ICWSM and IC2S2

Ablation as Targeted Perturbation to Rewire Communication Network of Persistent Atrial Fibrillation Susumu Tao, Samuel F. Way, ... , and Hiroshi Ashikaga PLOS One 12(7): e0179459, 2017

Gender, Productivity, and Prestige in Computer Science Faculty Hiring Networks Samuel F. Way, Daniel B. Larremore, and Aaron Clauset Proc. 25th Int'l World Wide Web Conf. (WWW), 2016

Quantifying convergence in the sciences Sara Lumbreras, Penny Mealy, Christopher Verzijl, and Samuel F. Way Pensamiento: Revista de Investigación e Información filosófica, 2016

Synthesis aided design: The biological design-build-test engineering paradigm? Ryan T. Gill, Andrea L. Halweg-Edwards, Aaron Clauset, and Samuel F. Way Biotechnol. Bioeng., 113: 7–10, 2015

Assembling thefacebook: Using heterogeneity to understand online social network assembly Abigail Z. Jacobs, Samuel F. Way, Johan Ugander and Aaron Clauset Proc. ACM Int'l Conf. on Web Science (WebSci), 2015

Which is more important for classifying microbial communities: who's there or what they can do? Zhenjiang Xu, Daniel Malmer, Morgan Langille, Samuel F. Way, and Rob Knight ISME J. 8(12): 2357-9, 2014

RAIphy: Phylogenetic classification of metagenomics samples using iterative refinement of relative abundance index profiles Ozkan U. Nalbantoglu, Samuel F. Way, Steven H. Hinrichs, and Khalid Sayood BMC Bioinformatics 12:41, 2011

A grammar-based distance metric enables fast and accurate clustering of large sets of 16S sequences David J. Russell, Samuel F. Way, Andrew K. Benson, and Khalid Sayood BMC Bioinformatics 11:601, 2010

Slide decks

06.04.20 – Visualizing Complex Science (Simply) at the Symposium for Data Science and Statistics 2020.

Press

05.22.19 – "What Matters Most on the Road to Scientific Success?" in Undark Magazine.
05.02.19 – "Pedigree and Productivity" in Inside Higher Ed.
04.29.19 – "'Pedigree is not destiny' when it comes to scholarly success" in Santa Fe Institute News.
01.16.19 – "In Science, Some Ideas Are More Contagious Than Others" in Scientific American.
10.25.18 – "Academic ideas are supposed to thrive on their merits. If only" on the Washington Post's Monkey Cage blog.
09.19.18 – "Predicting scientific success" in Nature Index.
09.11.18 – "UVa expanding paid parental leave" in The Daily Progress.
10.20.17 – "Scientists bust myth that academic productivity declines with age" in Times Higher Education.
10.17.17 – "Faculty careers can progress in many directions" in Science Careers.
10.17.17 – "Professors' Productivity Declines With Age, Right? Maybe Not." in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
10.17.17 – "Productivity: Age Is Just a Number" in Inside Higher Ed.
10.17.17 – "Does faculty productivity really decline with age? New study says no" in CU Boulder Today.
3.8.17 – "How the tyranny of prestige disadvantages women" in Science Careers.
2.3.17 – "Data-driven predictions in the science of science" in Science.
4.15.16 – "The complex role of gender in faculty hiring" in Science Careers.
7.23.15 – "Estos arqueólogos de Facebook exploran el pasado en busca del secreto de su éxito" in Hoja de Router.
4.6.15 – "Network Archaeologists Discover Two Types of Social Network Growth in Historical Facebook Data" in MIT Technology Review

About Me

I'm currently a Senior Applied Scientist at Flatiron Health, previously at Spotify, Facebook, and CU Boulder. I've had the great fortune of using machine learning and other computational tools to solve important and complex problems across a range of disciplines. Each application setting has given me a valuable lens and perspective to apply to the next.

Non-academic things about me: I'm passionate about music, both playing and listening. Recently I've been listening more than playing, but in the past, I played in jazz ensembles and in bands ranging from blues and funk to reggae. I love everything about food: making it, discussing it, learning about it. I'm a huge basketball fan. I love the outdoors and exploring new places. I enjoy learning about design and how it affects human behavior, including my own. Last, and perhaps most importantly, I'm always on the lookout for ways to move items from the "non-academic list" to the "academic list" – let me know if you'd like to help!