CIRSS Seminar: Hamed Alhoori

Hamed Alhoori, assistant professor of computer science at Northern Illinois University, will give the talk, "Utilizing Altmetrics to Support Research Stakeholders."

Abstract: The unprecedented growth of scholarly outcomes published annually has rendered the academic research environment correspondingly more complex. This talk provides an account of integrated methods and techniques to leverage diverse non-traditional web-based indicators (altmetrics) in support of scholarly communities, research agencies, policymakers, publishers, journalists, general readers, and other stakeholders. First, I will share some findings from research conducted with the goal of developing a better understanding of altmetrics and researchers' dynamic scholarly information behaviors. Second, I explore some of the ways in which altmetrics can be used to rank and recommend scholarly venues that are semantically related to researchers' current interests. Third, I provide an ensemble of machine learning models that use altmetrics and other features to predict the scholarly and societal impact of research articles. In making predictions, these models rely on factors such as scholarly citations, policy document citations, new mentions, and indicators of the public's understanding of science. Finally, I will share some directions for future research.

Alhoori is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Northern Illinois University and was a visiting scientist at Argonne National Laboratory. His broad research interests are in the areas of science of science, data science, and social media mining. He received his PhD and MS in Computer Science from Texas A&M University and his BSc in Computer Science from the University of Bahrain. He has worked on nationally and internationally funded multidisciplinary projects. His work has appeared in the Journal of Informetrics, ACM/IEEE JCDL, TPDL, ASIST, iConf, and other scholarly venues. In DH 2013, his work on identifying the impact of research using social media measures was shortlisted for the Young Scholar Award. He leads the DATA lab.