Associate Professor and PhD Program Director Jana Diesner will serve as a keynote speaker at the 1st workshop of reframing research at the European Symposium Series on Societal Challenges in Computational Social Science, which will be held December 5-7 in Cologne, Germany. The theme of the 2018 symposium is "Bias and Discrimination."
In addition to giving a keynote presentation, "Biases in Social Network Data and Theories," Diesner, in collaboration with Antske Fokkens and Wouter van Atteveldt from VU Amsterdam, organized and led the Workshop on Biases in Social Computing Data and Technology. This workshop will examine possible sources of bias in data sets and tools and discuss the importance of validation, transparency, and replicability/reproducibility. Adjunct Lecturer Nigel Bosch and Visiting Research Scientist Chieh-Li (Julian) Chin are members of the workshop's program committee.
At the symposium, Diesner also will give a talk on the paper, "Biases in Bibliometric Network Data and the Measurement of Triadic Closure," which she coauthored with Jinseok Kim (PhD '17), research assistant professor in the Institute for Social Research Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan.
Diesner's research in human-centered data science and social computing 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- and information-based systems. Recent recognition for her research expertise includes a Linowes Fellowship from the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research at Illinois (2018), a R.C. Evans Data Analytics Fellowship from the Deloitte Foundation Center for Business Analytics at Illinois (2018), and an appointment as the CIO Scholar for Information Research & Technology at Illinois (2018). Diesner has published more than 55 referred articles. She received her PhD from Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science (2012).