I am currently a member of the Connect group at Microsoft Research, Redmond.
I completed my Ph.D in 2011 from the Department of Computer Science at Arizona State University, Tempe. My advisor was Dr. Hari Sundaram. Thereafter I spent a little bit of time at the School of Communication and Information, Rutgers, working in the social media group with Dr. Mor Naaman.
My broad research interests span the area of "computational social science". I study collective human behavior as manifested via our online footprints. My dissertation dealt with computational and large-scale empirical analysis of communication dynamics in online social networks, as well as methods to identify relevant data that drive these dynamics. These have resulted in methods to understand and model information flow in networks, to mine emergent interactions in online communities and in the characterization of rich media artifacts.
My research has been featured on several national and international media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, Mashable and MIT Technology Review among others.
Keywords: social networks, social media, Twitter, social network analysis, emotions and moods, information diffusion, online communities, collective behavior, big data, data mining, social search, behavioral modeling.
Recent Professional Activities
- Track co-chair, "Social Media": at the ACM Hypertext and Social Media 2012.
- Program Committee member: EMNLP-CoNLL 2012, WSDM 2012, WWW 2012, ICWSM 2012, SocialCom 2012, ASONAM 2012, LSM 2012, RAMSS 2012, PSOSM 2012, WSM 2011.
- Journal Referee: Information Systems Research, PLoS one, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), IEEE Communications Magazine, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia.
News and Highlights
- 2012.02.28: Research on analyzing human moods and behavioral patterns at scale accepted as full paper, oral presentation at ICWSM 2012. A second poster paper on classifying affective states on social media accepted at ICWSM 2012 as well.
- 2012.02.15: Our work about identifying reliable information sources in Twitter, for journalistic inquiry, covered by Poynter and Mashable.
- 2012.02.02: Our research on classifying affect in social media, is now officially a part of Microsoft's Social Analytics! The MSDN blog post on this can be found here.
- 2012.01.10: Paper about identifying reliable social media sources for journalistic inquiry, accepted at CHI 2012 and can be found here.
- 2011.10.21: Paper on automatic classification of user types in social media, in response to events accepted at CSCW 2012 and can be found here. We were also a Best Note nominee.
- 2011.10.01: I am co-chairing the "Social Media" track at the 23rd ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media 2012 (HT 2012). Hope to see you in Milwaukee, WI in June with some exciting social media research!
- 2011.02.25: I defended my dissertation on Feb 28, 2011! Please find a copy of my defense talk slides here. The dissertation can be accessed via ProQuest here.
- 2010.09.01: Facebook Grace Hopper Scholarship for Women in Computing, 2010.
- 2010.07.23: Research on mining itinerary trails, covered by Wall Street Journal; also Yahoo! Labs link.
- 2010.06.15: Technology Review article about our work on mining tour itineraries from Flickr photos.
- 2010.05.14: MIT Technology Review article on my work at Yahoo! Research (inferring network structures).
- 2010.03.30: Facebook Fellowship Finalist (academic year: 2010-2011).