Yian Yin presentation

"Quantifying Success and Failure Dynamics in Science and Innovation"

Abstract: The recent explosion of large-scale datasets in science and technology has offered an unprecedented opportunity to capture the entirety of scientific enterprise at a level of scale and detail that was previously unimaginable. In this talk, I will focus on a few related but distinct studies to help us understand the complex dynamics of scientific success and failure across a wide variety of settings. In each study, I will begin by drawing together a large variety of empirical datasets that capture both successful and failed attempts across different domains of science and technology. I then build a modeling framework to quantify how successful innovations emerge from past repeated failures, how a community of innovators collectively contribute to punctuated record-breaking dynamics, and how scientific research interacts with other socioeconomic institutions. Through these examples, I hope to illustrate how a combination of canonical social science theories, large-scale empirical datasets, and complex systems tools can help us better understand the fundamental dynamics, predictability, and uncertainty of success and human achievements.

Bio: Yian Yin is a PhD candidate of Industrial Engineering & Management Sciences at Northwestern University, with research affiliations at the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems and Center for Science of Science and Innovation. His research embraces a combination of analytical tools from data science, modeling techniques from complexity science, and theoretical insights from sociology and economics to understand the fundamental dynamics and predictability of scientific and technological progress. Together, his works tell a complex yet insightful story about how successful innovations emerge from failures, how creative careers unfold with social and environmental changes, and how successful ideas in science interact with other socioeconomic institutions. Yin's research has been published in multidisciplinary journals including Nature, Science, Nature Human Behaviour, and Nature Reviews Physics and featured in a wide range of media outlets including Forbes, Fast Company, Scientific American, and MIT Technology Review.