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YU-RU LINAssistant Research Professor Office: Phone: 617-373-4222 Email: yuruliny@gmail.com |
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about
I am an assistant research professor at College of Social Sciences and Humanities, Northeastern University. I have been a postdoctoral research fellow at 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 network data mining. My work has focused on large-scale community dynamics, high-dimensional social information summarization and representation. I am currently working with Dr. David Lazer on understanding the structural and dynamical aspects of human communities related to political choices and under unfamiliar situations.
I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science with a concentration in Arts Media and Engineering from Arizona State University, where I worked with my advisor 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.
research highlights
My publications and talk slides can be downloaded here.04/2013 I am co-chairing 2013 KDD Mutimedia Data Mining Workshop, which will be held in conjunction with KDD 2013. The theme of this year is "mining large-scale rich content in a networked society." We look forward to your participation!03/2013 Paper accepted in ICWSM 2013: "#Bigbirds Never Die: Understanding Social Dynamics of Emergent Hashtags." This is the first study on the lifecycle of hashtag adoption and use in response to exogenous shocks.02/2013 Paper accepted in WWW 2013: "Voices of Victory: A Computational Focus Group Framework for Tracking Opinion Shift in Real Time" (P&E Track). The work was featured in news@Northeaster during the election. Check out the recap for the US presidential debates.10/2012 Released a series of election-related visualization. Check out visualization about Super PACs at vispolitics.com. The Angry PACs and the Horse-race fundraising was featured in The Atlantic.07/2012 Paper accepted in InfoVis 2012: "Whisper: Tracing the Spatiotemporal Process of Information Diffusion in Real Time." It was featured in Information Aesthetic. Check out the demo video.05/2012 Paper published in PLoS ONE:"Mesoscopic Structure and Social Aspects of Human Mobility". In the paper we discovered a universal "habitat" structure from spatiotemporal flows of human mobility, with temporal scaling patterns distinct from all previous observations and unpredicted by current models.04/2012 Paper accepted in Web Science 2012: "Recipe recommendation using ingredient networks". It was featured in Science News, techology review and NPR Blog.
tutorials
07/2012 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.