CIRSS Seminar: Vivek Singh

Vivek Singh, assistant professor in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University, will lead a session on "Behavioral Informatics."

Abstract: The field of Behavioral Informatics focuses on collecting, analyzing, and interpreting heterogeneous data to model and influence human behavior. The goal is to identify data-driven technologies that can sense and understand complex human behavior and also to create practical solutions that use this knowledge to persuade individuals to take actions beneficial for them. Through multiple examples, I will illustrate how online and sensor-based data can be analyzed in multiple health and wellbeing related tasks. At the same time, I will identify multiple challenges in utilizing such data to model human behavior (e.g. privacy and algorithmic bias) and illustrate early solution strategies.

Singh is the founding Director of Behavioral Informatics lab in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers. Before joining Rutgers, he was a post-doctoral researcher the MIT Media Lab. He holds a PhD in information and computer science from the University of California, Irvine. He obtained his bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science from the National University of Singapore. His work has appeared in leading disciplinary and interdisciplinary publication venues (e.g. Science, Proceedings of the IEEE) and has been covered by popular media (e.g. New York Times, BBC, Wall Street Journal). He won the 2013 "Big Data for Social Good" datathon organized by Telefónica, the Open Data Institute and the MIT, and was named as one of the "Rising Star" speakers by ACM Multimedia in 2016. Singh's research is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation and Google.

This event is sponsored by CIRSS