“Linking Collective Attention to Collective Actions,” Yu-Ru Lin, University of Pittsburgh

Event time: 
Monday, February 15, 2021 - 12:00pm through 1:15pm
Location: 
Online ()
Speaker: 
Yu-Ru Lin, Associate Professor in the School of Computing and Information, and Director of the PITT Computational Social Dynamics Lab (PICSO LAB) at the University of Pittsburgh
Event description: 

COMPUTATIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCE WORKSHOP

Abstract: Attention is a scarce resource in this information-rich world. Measuring and predicting the quantity of attention is crucially relevant to online content hosting, commerce, news media, political movements, public attitudes, and collective decision making. In this talk, I will present our recent works that link online attention and communication patterns to real-world actions. Using large-scale, longitudinal communication traces collected from Twitter and Youtube, we quantitatively characterize and compare the online activities and attention by online users holding distinct views, and link the attention dynamics to societal trends and events related to social issues including gun violence, abortion, anti-racism, and immigration. These studies help answer several important questions toward transforming society, such as how protests connect to the changes in online prejudice, how opposing political views have been marketed across different social media, and how crises may bring opportunity for reconciling conflicts.

Yu-Ru Lin is an Associate Professor in the School of Computing and Information at the University of Pittsburgh, where she directs the PITT Computational Social Dynamics Lab (PICSO LAB). She researches on the interaction of Computational Social Science, Data Mining, and Visualization. She specializes in using social network and text data along with statistical learning tools and social theories to study phenomena spanning societal events and policy, anomalous behaviors, and other crucially important complex patterns concerning collective attention and actions, as well as human and social dynamics in response to societal risks. Her work has appeared in prestigious scientific venues and has been featured in press including WSJ, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, MIT News, and NPR. She has authored or coauthored more than 100 refereed journal and conference papers and served on more than 50 conference program committees in the areas of big data, network science and computational social science, including KDD, WWW, IJCAI, WSDM, MM, ICWSM, etc. She has served as a chair/co-chair of leading social media and web mining conferences such as AAAI ICWSM and TheWebConference/WWW (Web & Society Track) and is serving as an Associate Editor for journals including PLOS ONE and Springer EPJ Data Science. She was selected as a Fellow of Kavli Frontiers of Science, National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Her research has received funding from the industry such as Amazon and Adobe, and government agencies including NSF, DARPA, AFOSR, and other agencies. Additional information can be found at: http://www.yurulin.com/.

This virtual workshop is open to the Yale community. To receive Zoom information, you must subscribe to the Computational Social Science Workshop. Please subscribe at this link: https://csap.yale.edu/computational-social-science-workshop.

This workshop is cosponsored by the Center for the Study of American Politics (CSAP) and the Yale School of Management (SOM) with support from the Initiative for Leadership and Organization at SOM.