| about | research | teaching | publications | cv |
YU-RU LINAssistant Professor
Office: Phone: 412-624-9470 Email: yurulin (at) pitt.edu |
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about
I am an assistant professor at School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh. In the past, I worked as an assistant research professor at the College of Social Sciences and Humanities, Northeastern University. I was also a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University and College of Computer and Information Science, Northeastern University.
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, rich-context (high-dimensional) social information summarization and representation. I have been using massive social media data and anonymized cellphone records (CDRs) to understand the collective responses with respect to political events and under exogenous shocks such as emergencies.
I am a computer scientist by training, and I identify myself as a computational social scientist as I concern more with 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.
During my postdoctoral training, I have worked with colleagues from the disciplines of Physics and Social Sciences in the BarabasiLab and the LazerLab, where I worked with Dr. David Lazer. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Arizona State University, with an interdisciplinary concentration in Arts Media and Engineering, where I worked with Dr. Hari Sundaram and Dr. Aisling Kelliher. My Ph.D. work focused on extracting human communities that collaborate around certain topics or shared media artifacts. I have proposed matrix and tensor based techniques for analyzing community structures and evolutions in time-varying heterogeneous social networks, and developed visualizations to support community discovery in the context of everyday social media use.
» Recruiting: I am looking for highly motivated students who have strong interest in pursuing research careers in the new areas of Data Science, Network Science, and Computational Social Science. See more information.
research highlights
My publications and talk slides can be found here.01/2015 Two papers accepted to appear in CHI 2015: "g-Miner: Interactive Visual Group Mining on Multivariate Graphs" and "Trajectory Bundling for Animated Transitions"10/2014 Paper published in EPJ Data Science: "The ripple of fear, sympathy and solidarity during the Boston bombings". This article presents the first empirical findings that systematically understand the underlying mechanisms of inter-communal relations by examining how different cities reacted, in terms of fear and expressions of social support, to a recent mass violence event, the Boston Marathon bombings. The work was featured in Pitt News, ScienceDaily, Phys.org, and PsychCentral.09/2014 I was invited to attend the 2014 Kavli Frontiers of Science symposium on December 5-7, 2014 in Tokyo, Japan, co-sponsored by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Sciences (JAFoS) and the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).09/2014 Paper accepted to appear in ICDM 2014: "UnTangle: Visual Mining for Data with Uncertain Multi-labels via Triangle Map" (full paper acceptance rate: 9.7%)08/2014 Paper accepted to appear in HICSS 2015: "What Makes Hyper-Local Online Discussion Forums Sustainable?" The paper got the Honorable Mention in HICSS.06/2014 Paper accepted to appear in IEEE VAST 2014: "#FluxFlow: Visual Analysis of Anomalous Information Spreading on Social Media." The paper won the Honorable Mention Award in VAST.05/2014 Paper published in PLoS ONE: "Rising Tides or Rising Stars?: Dynamics of Shared Attention on Twitter During Media Events". This article presents new empirical findings about how the social dynamics of online social interactions and information sharing temporarily but fundamentally change in response to external events.05/2014 Paper accepted to appear in HT 2014: "Twitter in Academic Conferences: Usage, Networking and Participation over Time"
teaching & tutorials
Fall 2014 Information Visualization07/2014 iSchool Writing Workshop06/2014 i3 Workshop on Network VisualizationFall 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2015 Data Mining07/2012 Network visualization and research methodology, 2012 Summer Dissertation Workshop in World History, July 26 and 27.06/2012 Network Visualization at the Northeastern/MIT/Harvard Computational Social Science 2012 Workshop. The tutorial materials are available at the workshop wiki. See visualization examples created by the workshop participants.
selected services
I have served as a program committee member for international data and web mining conferences and workshops including KDD 2015, IJCAI 2015, MM 2014, MM 2013, WSDM 2014, WSDM 2013, WWW 2015, WWW 2014, WWW 2012, WWW 2011, HT 2013, HT 2012, ICWSM 2015, ICWSM 2014, ICWSM 2012, ICWSM 2011, ICWSM 2010, LDMTA 2010, SocInfo 2011, etc. I have served as a reviewer for journals including IEEE TKDE, ACM TOMCCAP, ACM TOIS, Communications of the ACM, IEEE TMM, etc., and conferences including IUI, ACM SIGKDD, ACM MM, etc.Workshop Chair/Co-Chair: 2014 KDD Workshop on Learning about Emergencies from Social Information (KDD-LESI 2014), International Workshop on Collaborative Big Data (C-Big 2014), International Workshop on Challenges & Issues on Scholarly Big Data Discovery and Collaboration (SBD 2014), 2013 KDD Mutimedia Data Mining Workshop, 2011 Doctoral Symposium in ACM Multimedia.