Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for April
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AI Seminar- Predicting human behaviors in techno-social systems: fighting abuse and illicit activities
Fri, Apr 03, 2015 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Emilio Ferrara , Indiana University
Talk Title: Predicting human behaviors in techno-social systems: fighting abuse and illicit activities
Series: Artificial Intelligence Seminar
Abstract: The increasing availability of data across different socio-technical systems, such as online social networks, social media, and mobile phone networks, presents novel challenges and intriguing research opportunities. As more online services permeate through our everyday life and as data from various domains are connected and integrated with each other, the boundary between the real and the online worlds becomes blurry. Such data convey both online and offline activities of people, as well as multiple time scales and resolutions.
In this talk, I'll discuss my research efforts aimed at characterizing and predicting human behaviors and activities in techno-social worlds: starting by discussing network structure and information spreading on large social networks, I'll move toward characterizing entire online conversations, such as those around big real-world events, to capture the dynamics driving the emergence of collective attention and trending topics. I'll describe a machine learning framework leveraging these insights to detect promoted campaigns that mimic grassroots conversation. Aiming at learning the signature of abuse at the level of the single individuals, I'll illustrate the challenges posed by characterizing human activity as opposed to that of synthetic entities (social bots) that attempt emulate us, to persuade, smear, tamper or deceive. I'll draw a parallel with detecting illicit activities in the real world leveraging the traces left by criminals' interactions via mobile phones.
I'll conclude envisioning the design of computational systems that will help us making effective, timely decisions (informed by social data), and create actionable policies to contribute create a better future society.
Biography: Emilio Ferrara is research assistant professor at the School of Informatics and Computing of Indiana University, where he teaches I400/590 Mining the Social Web, and research scientist at the IU Network Science Institute. He holds a PhD in Mathematics & Computer Science with honors [University of Messina (IT), program ranked 2nd in Italy, top100 worldwide]. During his PhD years he was a visiting scholar at the Vienna University of Technology and at the Royal Holloway University of London. He was a postdoctoral fellow of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research at Indiana University, working with Alessandro Flammini and Fil Menczer for 2.5 years. He lead the DARPA/SMISC project on campaigns and social bots detection, and the DARPA Social Bot Detection Challenge for the IU team.
Emilioâs research interests lie at the intersection between Network Science, Data Science, Machine Learning, and Computational Social Science. His work explores Social Networks and Social Media Analysis, Criminal Networks, and Knowledge Engineering. His research appears on top journals like Communications of the ACM and Physical Review Letters, and on several ACM and IEEE Transactions Journals and Conference Proceedings.
He is Lead Guest Editor of the EPJ Data Science thematic series on Collective Behaviors and Networks, and serves in the Program Committees of several prestigious conferences like WWW, ICWSM, and SocInfo. Emilio is co-chair of various workshops recurring at ECCS, WWW, SocInfo, and WebScience; he was also the local & sponsor chair of ACM Web Science 2014 and publicity co-chair of SocInfo 2014.
His work has been featured on tech and business magazines like MIT Technology Review, TIME, New Scientist, Fast Company, Engadget, Wired, and Mashable, and on the popular press including on the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Seattle Times, the Atlantic, and BBC!
Emilio is a top 0.5% Kaggle competitor and enjoys participating to various data science competitions.
Host: Aram Galstyan
Webcast: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=0de28f610b2344099f9759c6f8e566f61dLocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr. Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey
WebCast Link: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=0de28f610b2344099f9759c6f8e566f61d
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
NL Seminar-Keeping Topic Models Fresh: Technical and Practical Challenges
Fri, Apr 03, 2015 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Don Metzler, Google
Talk Title: Keeping Topic Models Fresh: Technical and Practical Challenges
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: Topic models are statistical models that can be used to infer the most likely topics that some piece of text is about. Such models are useful for applications that rely on semantic representations of text, such as query classification, document understanding, and measuring semantic similarity. These models are widely used within Google. In this talk, I will first describe the details of one of these models -- one that learns over a million topics covering just about every language. I will then describe a number of technical and practical challenges involved in keeping such a model fresh and up-to-date within real-world applications.
Biography: Donald Metzler is a Staff Software Engineer at Google Inc. Prior to that, he was a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California (USC) and a Senior Research Scientist at Yahoo!. He has served as the Program Chair of the WSDM, ICTIR, and OAIR conferences and sat on the editorial boards of the major journals. He has published over 40 research papers, has been awarded 4 patents, and co-authored the textbook Search Engines: Information Retrieval in Practice.
Host: Nima Pourdamghani and Kevin Knight
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 6th Flr Conf Rm # 689, Marina Del Rey
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
NL Seminar- TRANSLI, NLP-based social media analytics and monitoring
Fri, Apr 10, 2015 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Atefeh Farzindar (NLP Technologies), (NLP Technologies)
Talk Title: TRANSLI, NLP-based social media analytics and monitoring
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: NLP Technologies have developed a technology for automated analysis of social media data. TRANSLI Social Media Analytics and monitoring, is an online visual analytics system designed to provide social intelligence from news and other events from Twitter. During this seminar, Dr. Atefeh Farzindar will give a presentation on TRANSLI-SM where the system features an intuitive user interface and is designed to browse and visualise the results of the semantic analysis of social discussion on specific events from Twitter. The user can obtain the information not only limited to the main event of interest but also to the intelligence for the sub events.
NLP Technologies Inc. is a Canadian company founded in 2005 and that expanded to California in 2014. The company specialises in natural language processing, NLP-based search engines, translation technologies and services, social media analytics, and automatic summarization. http://www.nlptechnologies.ca/
Biography: Dr. Atefeh Farzindar, CEO NLP Technologies Inc. and Adjunct professor at University of Montreal Dr. Atefeh Farzindar is the co-founder and CEO of NLP Technologies. She received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Montreal and her Doctorate in automatic summarization of legal documents from Paris-Sorbonne University in 2005. She has been an Adjunct professor at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Montreal since 2010, and she was Honorary Research Fellowship at the Research Group in Computational Linguistics at the University of Wolverhampton, UK (2010-2012).
Dr. Farzindar has been Action Editor in the international journal of Computational Intelligence since 2011. She co-edited two special issues on social media analysis for the International Journal of Computational Intelligence (CI) and Journal TAL, an international journal on natural language processing.
She co-authored an upcoming book on Natural Language Processing for Social Media [Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 2014], and authored a book chapter in Social Network Integration in Document Summarization, Innovative Document Summarization Techniques: Revolutionizing Knowledge Understanding, IGI Global publisher January 2014.
In 2013, Dr. Farzindar won Femmessor-Montréalâs contest, Succeeding with a balanced lifestyle, in the Innovative Technology and Information and Communications Technology category because of her involvement in the arts. Her paintings have recently been published in a book titled One Thousand and One Nights, in which the palette of vivid colours and her unique contemporary style revolved around on the place of women in modern society (Vernissage & Artist Book Launch April, Montréal, Galerie 203 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLCghx1mvzY)
Host: Nima Pourdamghani and Kevin Knight
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 6th Flr Conf Rm # 689, Marina Del Rey
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
NL Seminar- Exploiting Bilingual Corpora for Relation Extraction
Fri, Apr 17, 2015 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Longhua Qian, (Soochow University)
Talk Title: Exploiting Bilingual Corpora for Relation Extraction
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: Large-scale labeled corpora are always critical for Natural Language Processing tasks using statistical machine learning methods, but at the great expense of human labor of annotation. While we have various labeled corpora in different languages at hand, such as English and Chinese, either resource-rich or resource-poor, can these corpora be taken full advantage of for NLP tasks in different languages to help each other? The difficult lies in the fact that parallel corpora with aligned NLP entities are hard to acquire. In this talk, I shall first discuss how to generate pseudo-parallel corpora for relation extraction via machine translation and entity alignment techniques, and then I will proceed to apply this corpora to statistical ML-based relation extraction in terms of the degree of supervision: (1) supervised learning; (2) bilingual co-training; (3) bilingual active learning. This talk is chiefly based on the ACL-2014 paper âBilingual Active Learning for Relation Classification via Pseudo Parallel Corporaâ.
Biography: Longhua Qian is a visiting researcher from the School of Computer Science and Technology, Soochow University, China. He joined the Natural Language Group and will work with Professor Kevin Knight and his team members for one year. He will participate in on-going projects on Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) and Machine Reading etc. His mainly focuses on information extraction, relation extraction, and entity linking etc. He is also interested in extracting information from clinical medical records and building social networks from free text.
Host: Nima Pourdamghani and Kevin Knight
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
NL Seminar-Learning To Simplify Text One Sentence at a Time
Fri, Apr 24, 2015 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: David Kauchak , Pomona College
Talk Title: Learning To Simplify Text One Sentence at a Time
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: Information can now be found on almost any topic ranging from news to do-it-yourself guides to health-related articles. Unfortunately for readers, the complexity and readability of these texts can vary widely. Even if the concepts of an article are accessible, the language and structure of the text can prohibit a person from understanding these concepts.
Text simplification techniques are aimed at reducing the reading and grammatical complexity of text while retaining the meaning and are one approach to increasing information accessibility. Motivated by both corpus analyses and human experiments, I will introduce a number of recent text simplification techniques ranging from semi-automated approaches, that require a human in the loop, to automated approaches, including word-level, phrase-level and syntax-level models.
Biography: David Kauchak is currently an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Pomona College. Previously, he was at Middlebury College and has worked at Google, ISI, PARC and Adchemy. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of California, San Diego.
Host: Nima Pourdamghani and Kevin Knight
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr. Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor.
