Natural language research announcements

["Horn, Eric Bailey" <erichorn AT illinois.edu>]

The 2012 Data Sciences Summer Institute is proud to announce, as part of our Expert Speaker Series:

 

Mining social network activity to understand and predict user behavior

 

Jennifer Neville, Purdue University

 

Friday, June 15, 1pm

 

2405 Siebel Center

 

Abstract:

The recent popularity of online social networks has increased the amount of information available about users' behavior--including current activities and interactions among friends and family. This rich relational information can be used to predict user interests and preferences even when individual data is sparse, as birds of a feather do indeed flock together. Although these data offer several opportunities to improve search and retrieval, the characteristics of online social network data also present a number of challenges to accurately incorporate the information into retrieval algorithms. In this talk, I will describe our recently developed methods for (1) predicting relationship strength, (2) combining information from multiple social interaction networks, and (3) identifying sources of user correlation. While giving an overview of these methods, I will highlight algorithmic and evaluation challenges that may arise from modeling the complex network dependencies.

 

Bio:

Jennifer Neville is an assistant professor at Purdue University with a joint appointment in the Departments of Computer Science and Statistics. She received her PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2006. She received a DARPA IPTO Young Investigator Award in 2003 and was selected as a member of the DARPA Computer Science Study Group in 2007. In 2008, she was chosen by IEEE as one of "AI's 10 to watch" and in 2012 she received a NSF Career Award in 2012. Her research focuses on developing data mining and machine learning techniques for relational domains, including citation analysis, fraud detection, and social network analysis.

 

If you are interested in an individual meeting with this speaker, please contact Keely Ashman (kashman AT illinois.edu, 333-6454).

 

Data Sciences Summer Institute (DSSI):

The Data Sciences Summer Institute is a 6-week long program in Data Science areas for graduate and undergraduate students from around the country.  This summer program (May 20 – June 30, 2012) consists of an intensive class in the mathematical foundations of Data Sciences, tutorials on advanced Data Science topics and collaborative research projects.  The DSSI weaves together mathematical foundations, applications, and research.

 

The mission of the Data Sciences Summer Institute is to develop diverse human resources to enhance the scientific research, education, and government workforce in Data Science disciplines.  This program is funded by the Department of Homeland Security’s Center of Excellence – Command, Control, and Interoperability Center for Advanced Data Analysis (CCICADA) at the UIUC’s Multimodal Information Access & Synthesis (MIAS) Center, and by a grant from Yahoo!

 

For more information about the Data Sciences Summer Institute, please see our website at: http://mias.illinois.edu/DSSI2012 or contact Eric Horn at DSSI-cs AT illinois.edu, 217-333-0871.