I am an associate 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.