Prof. Albert-László Barabási is a distinguished professor at Northeastern University and one of the world's top researcher in the science of networks. His group routinely publishes in Science/Nature!
There's something to learn here: Part of his appeal to the masses is that he delves in very interesting topics ranging from predicting human mobility, making forecast about mobile phone viruses (which do not exist yet!) to visualizing mood swings of the US population based on data from twitter. Basically, everybody (even a layman!) can relate to this. If only a specialized audience can relate to your obscure work, it's unlikely that you can become popular.
The other part is that it is a relatively new field and he's a pioneer who's making quantum leap progress.
In a nutshell, his research consists of gathering large data sets (e.g. data from anonymous mobile phone users), analyzing the data, generating models and making predictions.
I was able to catch a glimpse of his recent book and I have to admit that it's thought provoking. In short, the book, through some well-crafted stories, reveal the predictability in human behavior. Barabási introduces some seemingly unrelated activities and shows that a virtually identical bursty (this is where the name of the book came from!) pattern emerges. Worth reading!
You may also want to read Linked from the same author!
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