[Colloq] Reminder (TODAY): Title: Understanding Social Systems: A Computational Perspective | Speaker: Derek Ruths, McGill University | Date: 4/1/16 Time: 10:30-11:30am Location: 366 WVH

[Walker, Lashauna]

Title: Understanding Social Systems: A Computational Perspective

Speaker: Derek Ruths, McGill University

Date: 4/1/16  Time: 10:30-11:30am   Location: 366 WVH



Abstract:

Social systems, from the online community to the urban metropolis, are complex with increasingly global interconnections.  Supporting the growth and health of such systems requires principled techniques for understanding and shaping their composition and behavior. Online social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, provide a promising means of gaining actionable system-scale insights in near real-time from user-generated content. In this talk, I outline the broad challenges to this endeavor and highlight the contributions that my work has made in a number of key areas such as the inference of community composition, the derivation of situational awareness from online data, the design and use of crowdsourcing tasks for leveraging human expertise, the mapping of implicit and explicit social narratives, and the characterization of control structures present within social (and other complex) networks.

Bio:

Derek Ruths is Associate Professor of Computer Science at McGill University.  He joined the faculty in 2009 after completing his PhD in Computer Science at Rice University.  His research group, the Network Dynamics Lab, characterizes and predicts the large-scale dynamics of human behavior in online social environments.  His work, which benefits from strong collaborations with Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms, has been published in top-tier journals and conferences including Science, EMNLP, ICWSM, and PLoS Computational Biology.  His research is currently funded by a wide array of organizations including NSERC (Canadian science funding), SSHRC (Canadian social science funding), CIHR (Canadian health funding), tech companies, and the US National Science Foundation - underscoring the broad, interdisciplinary nature of his work.  In his free time, his three children employ him as assistant engineer in their efforts to build light sabers, LEGO dragons, and rocket boots.


Thank You.

LaShauna Walker
Events and Administrative Specialist
College of Computer and Information Science
Northeastern University
617-373-2763
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