Our lab uses machine learning, natural language processing, and social network analysis to study text and graph data in online social networks like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Applications we have investigated include: estimating the spread of disease, estimating the health of a community, predicting which products should be recalled, and predicting when cyberbullying will occur. I will give a brief overview of some of this applications and the novel machine learning algorithms we designed to solve them. I will conclude with some possibilities for interdisciplinary collaboration.
Aron Culotta is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where he leads the Text Analysis in the Public Interest lab . He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2008, where he developed machine learning algorithms for natural language processing. He was a Microsoft Live Labs Fellow and completed research internships at IBM, Google, and Microsoft Research. His work has received best paper awards at AAAI and CSCW. He is Managing Editor of JMLR and an SPC member for AAAI and ICHI.
Lunch will be provided for those that RSVP at least 24 hours prior to the seminar.