[Colloq] HIRING TALK: Thursday @ 2:30pm in 366 WVH - Generative Models and Computational Social Science - Aaron Clauset

[Jessica Biron]

Generative Models and Computational Social Science 
Aaron Clauset, University of Colorado and the SFI 

Thursday, February 7 , 2:30pm 
366 WVH 

Abstract: 
Computation is revolutionizing our ability to understand and predict human social dynamics, both at the individual and population levels. Much of the great potential of this area depends on the development of new techniques both to uncover important patterns within vast quantities of detailed social data and to reliably test complex hypotheses about the mechanisms that produce them. Combining generative models with scalable inference algorithms provides a powerful, statistically principled and data-driven approach to solving this problem. 

In this talk, I'll describe generative models of community and hierarchical organization in complex networks. A hierarchical organization, it turns out, can simultaneously explain many of the statistical regularities most commonly studied in networks, can 
generalize a single network to an ensemble of statistically similar networks, and can make accurate predictions about missing links. Importantly, these models can be extended to include arbitrary degree distributions, edge weights, latent spaces and network dynamics, which opens many new questions for analysis. 

Time allowing, I'll describe a few results from a big data project analyzing nearly 1 billion team competitions from the popular online game Halo. Specifically, I'll try to cover some results on the structural determinants of "balanced" scoring in team competitions and on inferring friendship networks from online interaction data. This last project illustrates both the profound privacy implications and scientific potential of computational social science. 


Bio: 
Aaron Clauset is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the BioFrontiers Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he is affiliated faculty in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the Department of Applied Mathematics. He is also External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. He received a PhD in Computer Science, with distinction, from the University of New Mexico, a BS in Physics, with honors, from Haverford College, and was an Omidyar Fellow at the prestigious Santa Fe Institute. 

He is an internationally recognized expert on computational social science, with emphases on complex networks, data analysis, human population dynamics, and the statistics of conflict and competition. His work has appeared in prestigious scientific venues like Nature, Science, JACM, AAAI, ICML, STOC, SIAM Review, and Physical Review Letters, and has been covered in the popular press by the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Discover Magazine, New Scientist, Wired, Miller-McCune, the Boston Globe and The Guardian. 

For more details see http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~aaronc/ 

Jessica Biron 
Administrative Assistant – Office of the Dean and CCIS Development 
College of Computer and Information Science 
Northeastern University 
202 West Village H 
617-373-5204 
bironje at ccis.neu.edu 
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/ 
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