| 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 have worked as an assistant research professor at the College of Social Sciences and Humanities, Northeastern University. I have also been 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.
research highlights
My publications and talk slides can be downloaded here.11/2013 Paper "Why so Similar?: Identifying Semantic Organizing Processes in Large Textual Corpora" makes SSRN's Top Ten list.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.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.
teaching & tutorials
Fall 2013 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.