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Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for May
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AI Seminar-Charting Collections of Connections in Social Media: Creating Maps and Measures with NodeXL
Thu, May 05, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Marc Smith, Social Media Research Foundation
Talk Title: Charting Collections of Connections in Social Media: Creating Maps and Measures with NodeXL
Series: Artificial Intelligence Seminar
Abstract: Networks are a data structure commonly found in any social media service that allows populations to author collections of connections. The Social Media Research Foundation's NodeXL project makes analysis of social media networks accessible to most users of the Excel spreadsheet application. With NodeXL, network charts become as easy to create as pie charts. Recent research created by applying the tool to a range of social media networks has already revealed the variations in network structures present in online social spaces. A review of the tool and images of Twitter, flickr, YouTube, Facebook and email networks will be presented.
Description: We now live in a sea of tweets, posts, blogs, and updates coming from a significant fraction of the people in the connected world. Our personal and professional relationships are now made up as much of texts, emails, phone calls, photos, videos, documents, slides, and game play as by face-to-face interactions. Social media can be a bewildering stream of comments, a daunting fire hose of content. With better tools and a few key concepts from the social sciences, the social media swarm of favorites, comments, tags, likes, ratings, updates and links can be brought into clearer focus to reveal key people, topics and sub-communities. As more social interactions move through machine-readable data sets new insights and illustrations of human relationships and organizations become possible. But new forms of data require new tools to collect, analyze, and communicate insights.
The Social Media Research Foundation (http://www.smrfoundation.org), formed in 2010 to develop open tools and open data sets, and to foster open scholarship related to social media. The Foundation's current focus is on creating and publishing tools that enable social media network analysis and visualization from widely used services like email, Twitter, Facebook, flickr, YouTube and the WWW. The Foundation has released the NodeXL project (http://nodexl.codeplex.com/), a spreadsheet add-in that supports "network overview discovery and exploration". The tool fits inside your existing copy of Excel in Office 2007, 2010 and 2013 and makes creating a social network map similar to the process of making a pie chart.
Using NodeXL, users can easily make a map of public social media conversations around topics that matter to them. Maps of the connections among the people who recently said the name of a product, brand or event can reveal key positions and clusters in the crowd. Some people who talk about a topic are more in the "center" of the graph, they may be key influential members in the population. NodeXL makes it a simple task to sort people in a population by their network location to find key people in core or bridge positions. NodeXL supports the exploration of social media with import features that pull data from personal email indexes on the desktop, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, Wikis, blogs and WWW hyper-links. The tool allows non-programmers to quickly generate useful network statistics and metrics and create visualizations of network graphs.
A book Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a connected world is available from Morgan-Kaufmann. The book provides an introduction to the history and core concepts of social network analysis along with a series of step-by-step instructions that illustrate the use of the key features of NodeXL. The second half of the book is dedicated to chapters by a number of leading social media researchers that each focus on a single social media service and the networks it contains. Chapters on Twitter, email, YouTube, flickr, Facebook, Wikis, and the World Wide Web illustrate the network data structures that are common to all social media services.
A recent report co-authored with the Pew Research Center's Internet Project documents the discovery of the six basic forms of social media network structures present in social media platforms like Twitter. The report, "Mapping Twitter Topic Networks: From Polarized Crowds to Community Clusters" provides a step by step guide to analyzing social media networks.
Biography: Marc Smith is a sociologist specializing in the social organization of online communities and computer mediated interaction. Smith leads the Connected Action consulting group and lives and works in Silicon Valley, California. Smith co-founded and directs the Social Media Research Foundation (http://www.smrfoundation.org/), a non-profit devoted to open tools, data, and scholarship related to social media research.
Smith is the co-editor with Peter Kollock of Communities in Cyberspace (Routledge), a collection of essays exploring the ways identity; interaction and social order develop in online groups. Along with Derek Hansen and Ben Shneiderman, he is the co-author and editor of Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a connected world, from Morgan-Kaufmann which is a guide to mapping connections created through computer-mediated interactions.
Smith's research focuses on computer-mediated collective action: the ways group dynamics change when they take place in and through social cyberspaces. Many "groups" in cyberspace produce public goods and organize themselves in the form of a commons (for related papers see: http://www.connectedaction.net/marc-smith/). Smith's goal is to visualize these social cyberspaces, mapping and measuring their structure, dynamics and life cycles. While at Microsoft Research, he founded the Community Technologies Group and led the development of the "Netscan" web application and data mining engine that allowed researchers studying Usenet newsgroups and related repositories of threaded conversations to get reports on the rates of posting, posters, crossposting, thread length and frequency distributions of activity. He contributes to the NodeXL project (http://nodexl.codeplex.com/) that adds social network analysis features to the familiar Excel spreadsheet. NodeXL enables social network analysis of email, Twitter, Flickr, WWW, Facebook and other network data sets.
The Connected Action consulting group (http://www.connectedaction.net) applies social science methods in general and social network analysis techniques in particular to enterprise and internet social media usage. SNA analysis of data from message boards, blogs, wikis, friend networks, and shared file systems can reveal insights into organizations and processes. Community managers can gain actionable insights into the volumes of community content created in their social media repositories. Mobile social software applications can visualize patterns of association that are otherwise invisible.
Smith received a B.S. in International Area Studies from Drexel University in Philadelphia in 1988, an M.Phil. in social theory from Cambridge University in 1990, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from UCLA in 2001. He is an adjunct lecturer at the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland. Smith is also a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Media-X Program at Stanford University.
Host: Emilio Ferrara
Webcast: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=2abc878bdcdd43c1bbba80cdc09562c41dLocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey
WebCast Link: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=2abc878bdcdd43c1bbba80cdc09562c41d
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-THE TECHKNACQ PROJECT: BUILDING PEDAGOGICALLY TUNED READING LISTS FROM TECHNICAL CORPORA
Fri, May 06, 2016 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Gully Burns, USC/ISI
Talk Title: THE TECHKNACQ PROJECT: BUILDING PEDAGOGICALLY TUNED READING LISTS FROM TECHNICAL CORPORA
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: This work is geared towards developing pedagogically-tuned information retrieval systems to help learners select the most informative documents as a reading list for a given query over a given technical corpus. This work will enable learners to understand complex subjects more quickly. I will discuss our overall methodology, our efforts to study dependency between topics within a technical corpus and improvements to evaluating topic quality. I will describe ongoing efforts to study a document's pedagogical value to the end user and future directions for this enterprise.
Biography: Gully Burns' focus is to develop pragmatic knowledge engineering systems for scientists in collaboration with experts from the field of AI. He was originally trained as a physicist at Imperial College in London before switching to do a Ph.D. in neuroscience at Oxford. He came to work at USC in 1997, developing the 'NeuroScholar' project in Larry Swanson's lab before joining the Information Sciences Institute in 2006. He is as Research Lead at ISI.
Host: Xing Shi 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-Towards Multi-Agent Communication-Based Language Learning
Fri, May 13, 2016 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Angeliki Lazaridou, University of Trento
Talk Title: Towards Multi-Agent Communication-Based Language Learning
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: One of the most ambitious goals of AI is to develop intelligent conversational agents able to communicate with humans and assist them in their tasks. Thus, communication and interaction should be at the core of the learning process of these agents; failure to integrate communication as their main building block raises concerns regarding their usability.
In this talk, I will propose an interactive multimodal framework for language learning. Instead of being passively exposed to large amounts of natural text, our learners (implemented as feed-forward neural networks) engage in cooperative referential games starting from a tabula rasa setup, and thus develop their own language from the need to communicate in order to succeed at the game. Preliminary experiments provide promising results, but also suggest that it is important to ensure that agents trained in this way do not develop an ad-hoc communication code only effective for the game they are playing.
Biography: Angeliki is a final year PhD student at the Center for Mind/Brain Sciences of the University of Trento. She received her MSc from the Saarland University, where she worked with Ivan Titov and Caroline Sporleder on Bayesian models for sentiment and discourse. She is currently working at the intersection between language and vision under the supervision of Marco Baroni.
Host: Xing Shi 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. -
AI SEMINAR
Thu, May 19, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Filippo Menczer, Professor, University of Indiana, Bloomington
Talk Title: The Spread of Misinformation in Social Media
Series: AI Seminar
Abstract: As social media become major channels for the diffusion of news and information, they are also increasingly attractive and targeted for abuse and manipulation. This talk overviews ongoing network analytics, data mining, and modeling efforts to understand the spread of misinformation online and offline. I present machine learning methods to detect astroturf and social bots, and outline initial steps toward computational fact-checking, as well as theoretical models to study how truthful and truthy facts compete for our collective attention. These efforts will be framed by a case study in which, ironically, our own research became the target of a coordinated disinformation campaign. Joint work with many members and collaborators of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research and the Indiana University Network Science Institute. This research is supported by the National Science Foundation, McDonnell Foundation, and DARPA. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of these funding agencies.
Biography: Filippo Menczer is a professor of informatics and computer science, adjunct professor of physics, and a member of the cognitive science program at Indiana University, Bloomington. He holds a Laurea in Physics from the University of Rome and a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Menczer has been the recipient of Fulbright, Rotary Foundation, and NATO fellowships, and a Career Award from the National Science
Foundation. He currently serves as director of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, as a member of the Scientific Leadership Team of the IU Network Science Institute, and is a Fellow of the Institute for Scientific Interchange Foundation in Torino, Italy, a Senior Research Fellow of The Kinsey Institute, and an ACM Distinguished Scientist. He previously served as division chair in the IUB School of Informatics and Computing, and was Fellow-at-large of the Santa Fe Institute. His research focuses on Web science, social networks, social media, social computation, Web mining, distributed and intelligent Web applications, and modeling of complex information networks. His work has been covered in many US and international news
sources, including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, NPR, CNN, BBC, Nature, and Science.
Host: Aram Galstyan
Webcast: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=06801a2cef6c4a22bdb908bd2e186dbb1dLocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 1135 - 11th fl Large CR
WebCast Link: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=06801a2cef6c4a22bdb908bd2e186dbb1d
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Alma Nava / Information Sciences Institute
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. -
AI SEMINAR
Fri, May 20, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: James Gleeson, Professor, University of Limerick
Talk Title: Competition and avalanches in social spreading phenomena
Series: AI Seminar
Abstract: We consider the spreading of memes (distinct pieces of information like ideas, hashtags, URLs, etc.) on a large directed social network, like Twitter. We use a branching-process model to describe how users choose among multiple sources of incoming information, similar to models used in other studies, which rely on intensive computational simulations to fit to data. In contrast, we here develop analytical insights into the respective roles of the network degree distribution, the memory-time distribution of users, and the competition between memes for the limited resource of user attention. The result is a form of self-organised criticality, which we dub competition-induced criticality. Using this analysis, we fit the model to data on Twitter hashtags, and predict features of the time-dependent data. This work is in collaboration with Yamir Moreno, Raquel A. Baños (both Universidad de Zaragoza), and Kevin O Sullivan (University of Limerick)
Biography: Professor James Gleeson holds the Chair in Industrial and Applied Mathematics at the University of Limerick. He is a graduate of University College Dublin in Mathematical Sciences and Mathematical Physics and received his PhD in Applied Mathematics from Caltech in 1999. Following his graduation from Caltech, he was a visiting assistant professor in Arizona State University, and then moved to University College Cork for 7 years, before taking up his current position at the University of Limerick. He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Complex Networks; is a council member of the European Consortium for Mathematics for Industry, and was appointed to the Irish Research Council by Minister Sean Sherlock in 2013. As co-director of MACSI, the Mathematics Applications Consortium for Science and Industry, he leads research into applications of mathematics to real-world problems with significant economic and social impact. His research interests include stochastic dynamics and contagion on complex networks
Host: Kristina Lerman
Webcast: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=fff38167d27a42cc9a0ad981a082d7c71dLocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 1135 - 11th fl Large CR
WebCast Link: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=fff38167d27a42cc9a0ad981a082d7c71d
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Alma Nava / Information Sciences Institute
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-Natural Language Communication with Computers
Fri, May 20, 2016 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Yonatan Bisk, USC/ISI
Talk Title: Natural Language Communication with Computers
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: We propose a framework for devising testable algorithms for bridging the communication gap between humans and robots. We begin with a setting in which humans give instructions to robots using unrestricted language commands, with instruction sequences aimed at building complex goal configurations in a blocks world. I will present details of our data-collection effort, and preliminary results on action understanding. Time permitting, I will present new baseline results for flipping the semantic parsing paradigm to address the problem of language generation, where a human performs commands produced by a machine to demonstrate basic two-way communication.
Biography: Yonatan Bisk received his PhD from UIUC in 2015 under Professor Julia Hockenmaier and is now a Postdoc with Daniel Marcu at ISI.
Host: Xing Shi and Kevin Knight
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 6th Floor -CR # 689; ISI-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.
