Events Calendar

CS Colloquium: Fred Morstatter (USC-ISI) - Discovering, Mitigating and Characterizing Social Data Bias

Speaker: Fred Morstatter, USC - ISI

Talk Title: Discovering, Mitigating and Characterizing Social Data Bias

Series: CS Colloquium

Abstract: Researchers and practitioners use social media to extract actionable patterns about human behavior. However, biases are inevitable and can either be a hindrance or an asset to such analysis. In this talk, I will discuss perturbations to the underlying data that can lead to flawed analysis. I will show how common assumptions in handling social media data can lead to flawed research results, and suggest approaches to combat these problems. However, if we understand the biases in our dataset it can lead to deeper understanding of the populations we wish to study. Once the biases underlying a social dataset are recognized, researchers are in a better position to study the unique characteristics underlying different cultural groups. This talk will conclude with a discussion of ways to identify cultural groups online and to characterize the biases between them.


This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium. Please note, due to limited capacity, seats will be first come first serve.

Biography: Fred Morstatter is a Computer Scientist at the Information Science Institute. His research focuses on understanding biases that occur in online social data. Specifically, he is interested in biases that can skew research results from big social data. He is also interested in characterizing the biases of cultural groups based upon the trace data they create on social media. He has been a key contributor to the Synergistic Anticipation of Geopolitical Events (SAGE) project under IARPA's Hybrid Forecasting Competition. This project combines human judgement with machine forecasts of geopolitical events in the form of a web platform that serves as a vehicle for research in social media mining. He has published in JMLR, WWW, KDD and ICWSM, among others. He is Program Committee Chair for ICWSM 2019. A full list of publications can be found at www.fredmorstatter.com. Contact him at fredmors@isi.edu.

Host: Computer Science

Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 100D

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Assistant to CS chair