I am an assistant professor at School of Information Sciences, 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 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.
-
08/2016 Paper accepted to appear in SocInfo 2016: "The Dynamics of Group Risk Perception in the US After Paris Attacks."
-
08/2016
Tutorial on "Collective Sensemaking via Social Sensors" (with Jiebo Luo and Yuheng Hu) at KDD 2016. Tutorial slides are available.
-
07/2016 Awarded the 2016 Multidisciplinary Research Grant from Pitt Center for Industry Studies (CIS).
-
07/2016 Paper accepted to appear in CIKM 2016: "PairFac: Event Analytics through Discriminant Tensor Factorization."
-
07/2016
Tutorial on "Analyzing User behaviors via Data Visualization Techniques" (with Nan Cao) at SBP 2016. Tutorial slides are available.
-
06/2016
Co-chairing The International Workshop on Social Web for Disaster Management (SWDM 2016), held in conjunction with CIKM 2016, in Indianapolis, US. We look forward to your participation!
-
05/2016
Co-chairing The International Workshop on Collaborative Internet Computing for Disaster Management (CIC-DM 2016), held in conjunction with IEEE CIC 2016, in Pittsburgh, PA, US. We are exciting to have this event in Pitt!
-
04/2016 Paper accepted to appear in ICWSM 2016: "EigenTransitions with Hypothesis Testing: The Anatomy of Urban Mobility"
-
04/2016 Three papers accepted to appear in SBP 2016: "Sensing Distress Following A Terrorist Event," "TELELINK: Link Prediction in Social Network Based on Multiplex Cohesive Structures" and "Link Prediction via Multi-Hashing Framework"
-
01/2016 Published our editorial for the special issue on Big Scholar Data Discovery and Collaboration, IEEE Transactions on Big Data (TBD)
-
05/2015 Paper published in Journal of the Royal Society Interface (J. R. Soc. Interface):
"Tracking employment shocks using mobile phone data".
We present novel methods to detect mass layoffs, identify individuals affected by them and predict changes in aggregate unemployment rates using call detail records (CDRs) from mobile phones.
The work was covered in WSJ Real Time Economics,
The Boston Globe,
The Atlantic,
Fast Company,
MIT News,
Science Newsline,
Science Blog,
ScienceDaily
.
» More on earlier updates.
