Associate Professor and PhD Program Director Jana Diesner has been appointed as a 2018-19 R.C. Evans Data Analytics Fellow in the University of Illinois-Deloitte Foundation Center for Business Analytics. Launched in 2016, the Center is part of the Gies College of Business at the Urbana campus.
As a fellow, her duties will be to support the mission of the Center, which aims to advance business analytics education and uses a cross-disciplinary approach to revolutionize practices surrounding big data. Diesner will develop and release two case studies—Governance of Data Analytics, and Ethics of Data Science—that will build on the curricula developed by the Center.
She will give a talk on the topic of her fellowship, "Practical Ethics and Responsible Computing: Discovering Problems and Designing Solutions through Interdisciplinary Research," at the 2018 Partners in Business Ethics Symposium. The symposium, which will be held October 23-24 on the Urbana campus, is co-hosted by the Center for Professional Responsibility in Business and Society and the University of Illinois-Deloitte Foundation Center for Business Analytics.
Diesner's research in human-centered data science and computational social sciences combines methods from network science, natural language processing, and machine learning with theories from the social sciences, humanities, and linguistics to advance knowledge and discovery about interaction-based and information-based systems.
Recognition for her research expertise includes appointments as the Linowes Fellow in the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research at Illinois (2018), CIO Scholar for Information Research & Technology at Illinois (2018); faculty fellow at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at Illinois (2015); and research fellow in the Dori J. Maynard Senior Research Fellows program (2016), which is a collaboration of The Center for Investigative Reporting and The Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. She holds a PhD from the Computation, Organizations and Society (COS) program at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science.