Social Computing

Chair: Nina Mishra, Microsoft Research Speakers: Barbara Poblete, University of Chile Emre Kiciman, Microsoft Research Fernando Diaz, Microsoft Research

Speaker Details

Dr. Barbara Poblete is an Assistant Professor at the University of Chile. She received her Engineering and M.Sc. from the University of Chile in Santiago, Chile and her Ph.D. from the University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain. She worked as a researcher at Yahoo Labs Santiago and later joined the University of Chile where she holds her current position. Dr. Poblete is head of the PRISMA research group at the Computer Science Department of the University of Chile.

Dr. Poblete’s research interests are in the areas of Web data mining, online social network analysis and information retrieval on the Web. Her work on time-sensitive credibility in microblog platforms, published at The World Wide Web Conference and in the journal Internet Research, has been recognized by important news media, such as Scientific American Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Slate Magazine, among others. Currently, she serves in the Program Committee of the conferences SIGIR, ECIR, CIKM and the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. In addition, she is one of the organizers in the annual Celebration of Women in Computing in Chile.

Emre Kiciman is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond. He is broadly interested in using social data to help people find what they want and need; and to this end works on extracting from social media useful models of people’s interactions with the world and their consequences. His research includes foundations and infrastructure for better social media analysis, connecting social media to the real world, and social systems engineering. Emre’s previous research interests include JavaScript application monitoring and optimization, as well as improving the reliability of Internet services architectures and operations. Emre received his Ph.D. and M.S. from Stanford University, and his B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from U.C. Berkeley.

Fernando Diaz is a researcher at Microsoft. His primary research interest is formal information retrieval models and his research experience includes distributed information retrieval approaches to web search, interaction logging and modeling, interactive and faceted retrieval, mining of temporal patterns from news and query logs, cross-lingual information retrieval, graph-based retrieval methods, and synthesizing information from multiple corpora. Fernando received his PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2008. His work on federation won the best paper awards at the WSDM 2009, SIGIR 2009, and ECIR 2011 conferences. His work on crisis informatics has received awards at SIGIR 2011 and ISCRAM 2013. He is a co-organizer of the Temporal Summarization track and Web track at TREC 2013 and WSDM 2014.

Date:
Speakers:
Barbara Poblete, Emre Kiciman, and Fernando Diaz
Affiliation:
University of Chile, Microsoft