Events Calendar

AI Seminar

Speaker: Johan Bollen, Univeristy of Indiana

Talk Title: Social factors in the quantification of online happiness

Abstract: More than 1/7th of the worlds population is actively using social media to establish and maintain social relations across linguistics, geographic, and economic boundaries. The introduction of social media has however had contradictory effects. Whereas as a social species we require social relations for our well-being, recent results indicate that widespread social media use leads to increased feelings of dissatisfaction and reduced happiness. The key to this paradox may lie in the unequal distribution of social relations in social networks and their interaction with collective and individual subjective well-being. In this talk I will highlight two results of our investigations of how subjective well-being interacts with, and is shaped by, the structural properties of large-scale social networks. Our research provides a framework for understanding how online social networking may have contradictory effects on collective happiness and well-being, and how to mitigate these effects

Biography: Johan Bollen is associate professor at the Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing. He was formerly a staff scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science of Old Dominion University. He obtained his PhD in Experimental Psychology from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) in 2001. He has published more than 75 articles on computational social science, social media analytics, informetrics, and digital libraries. His research has been funded by the NSF, IARPA, and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Johan lives inBloomington, Indiana with his wife and daughter. In his free time he enjoys P90x and DJing in the local Bloomington clubs as DJ Angst.

Host: Emilio Ferrara

Location: 11th floor large conference room

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Kary LAU