I am an assistant professor at School of Computing and Information, University of Pittsburgh. I am interested in studying social and political networks, as well as computational and visualization methods for understanding network data. My work has focused on large-scale community dynamics, high-dimensional (rich-context) social information summarization and representation. I have been using massive social media data and anonymized cellphone records to understand the collective responses with respect to political events and under exogenous shocks such as emergencies. I lead the PITT Computational Social Dynamics Lab (PICSO LAB).
I am a computer scientist by training, and a computational social scientist working on questions like: "how would a society be informed?" "how do people share information, ideas and opinions in various contexts?" These questions have led me to explore analytical and computational techniques for mining heterogeneous, multi-relational, and semistructured data that can advance our understanding about structures in networked societies. I was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University and College of Computer and Information Science, Northeastern University.
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06/2018
Honored to join the PLOS ONE Editorial Board to serve as an Academic Editor in Complex Networks.
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06/2018
Selected for award on the DARPA Understanding Group Biases (UGB) program. This award aims to develop and advance reproducible approach in revealing biases of different groups or cultures by leveraging big data and scalable, interpretable methods. New postdocs and research assistant positions will be available soon!
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04/2018
Paper accepted to appear in IJCAI 2018: "Deep into Hypersphere: Robust and Unsupervised Anomaly Discovery in Dynamic Networks."
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03/2018
I am co-organizing International Workshop on Event Analytics using Social Media Data (EASM 2018), co-located with ICWSM 2018, at Stanford, CA, USA. We look forward to your participation!
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03/2018
Paper accepted to appear in Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery (DAMI): "Anomaly Detection in Spatial-Temporal Data via Regularized Non-Negative Tensor Analysis."
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02/2018
Paper accepted to appear in ACM TKDD: "Event Analytics via Discriminant Tensor Factorization."
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11/2017
Paper published at EPJ Data Science Journal: "Measuring and monitoring collective attention during shocking events." Check out the SpringerOpen blog post that featured this article!
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11/2017
How do Democrats and Republicans compete for fundraising dollars? Check out our new paper published at Research & Politics Journal: "The geography of money and politics: Population density, social networks, and political contributions." This article examines the social antecedents of contributing to campaigns, with a particular focus on the role of population density and social networking opportunities.
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10/2017
Our studies (about fear & distress) were cited by an article in Las Vegas Sun to explain how the latest mass shooting in Las Vegas could trigger many's lasting emotional reactions regardless of where they live.
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09/2017
I am co-organizing the International Workshop on Social Web for Disaster Management (SWDM 2018), co-located with WSDM 2018, at Los Angeles, USA. We look forward to your participation!
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09/2017
Our Pitt Smart Living Project (recently funded by NSF) was featured in Pittwire. The project has also been covered in Pittsburgh Post Gazette, Pittsburgh's NPR News Station, Oakland Business Improvement District NewsLetter, and Pitt University Times.
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08/2017
Paper accepted to appear in CIKM 2017: "Anomaly Detection in Dynamic Networks Using Multi-View Time-Series Hypersphere Learning."
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07/2017
Paper accepted to appear in VAST 2017: "Voila: Visual Anomaly Detection and Monitoring with Streaming Spatiotemporal Data."
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05/2017
Paper accepted to appear in WebSci 2017: "The Signals and Noise: Actionable Information in Improvised Social Media Channels During a Disaster"
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03/2017 Paper accepted to appear in Risk Analysis Journal: "Tracking and Analyzing Individual Distress Following Terrorist Attacks Using Social Media Streams."
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01/2017 Paper accepted to appear in CHI 2017: "iSphere: Focus+Context Sphere Visualization for Interactive Large Graph Exploration."
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09/2016 Received two NSF awards to advance Computational Social Science Research. One was featured in NSF news. See the news for details.
» More on earlier updates.
