New Computer Science Seminar Series kicks off 2/25
We invite you to join us for the first talk in our Computer Science Seminar Series, a monthly speaker event that will showcase leading regional experts in computer science to discuss a range of top-of-mind topics. Curated by Director of Computer Science Dr. Ian Gorton, the series will provide a great opportunity for industry to gather in the classroom and network at Northeastern University-Seattle’s campus in South Lake Union.
CS Seminar: Predicting Demographics and Affect in Social Networks
February 25, 4:30pm @ Northeastern University-Seattle, 401 Terry Ave. N, Suite 103
An in-depth discussion and networking opportunity with predictive analytics expert Dr. Svitlana Volkova, Research Scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Social media predictive analytics bring unique opportunities to study people and their behaviors in real time, at an unprecedented scale: who they are, what they like and what they think and feel. Such large-scale real-time social analytics provide a novel set of conditions for the construction of predictive models. RSVP HERE
Dr. Volkova’s work focuses on various approaches to handling this dynamic data for predicting latent user demographics, from constrained-resource batch classification, to incremental bootstrapping, and then iterative learning via interactive rationale (feature) crowdsourcing. In addition, she studied the relationships between a variety of perceived user properties e.g., income, education etc. and opinions, emotions and interests in a social network.
Speaker Bio
Svitlana Volkova received her PhD in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University. She was affiliated with the Center for Language and Speech Processing and the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence. Her PhD research focused on building predictive models for socio-linguistic content analysis in social media. She has been mainly working on online models for streaming social media analytics, fine-grained emotion detection and multilingual sentiment analysis, and effective annotation techniques via crowdsourcing incorporated into the active learning framework. She interned at Microsoft Research in 2011, 2012 and 2014 at the Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning and Perception teams. She was awarded the Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship in 2010 and the Fulbright Scholarship in 2008.
The next CS seminars will take place March 24 and April 21, stay tuned for topics to be announced!