School of Information Sciences

Diesner lab to present research at computational social science conference

Members of Associate Professor and PhD Program Director Jana Diesner's Social Computing Lab will present a tutorial, paper, and posters at the 6th Annual International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2), which will be held virtually from July 17-20. The conference brings together academic researchers, industry experts, open data activists, and government agency workers to explore challenges, methods, and research questions in the field of computational social science.

Shubhanshu Mishra (PhD '20), doctoral candidate Rezvaneh Rezapour, and Diesner will teach a hands-on tutorial on tasks, data, and open source tools for information extraction from social media.

Doctoral student Kanyao Han will present the paper, "Human-in-the-Loop Construction of a Knowledge Base for Computer Science through Wikipedia," which he coauthored with Diesner, Mishra, Informatics doctoral student Pingjing Yang, and Kehan Li (BS '20, statistics and computer science). According to the researchers, domain-specific knowledge bases and vocabularies are useful for extracting information from text data, but because they are usually manually created by domain experts, they are costly and time-consuming. In this paper, the Diesner lab investigates how crowd-sourced data such as Wikipedia can be leveraged to build domain-specific vocabularies.

Posters to be presented will include:

  • "Adversarial Perturbations to Manipulate the Perception of Power and Influence in Networks" by doctoral students Nikolaus Parulian and Mihai Avram, MS/IM student Tiffany Lu, Mishra, and Diesner.
  • "How Does Situational Awareness of Emergencies Depend on Choices about Data Sources, Analysis Methods, and Implementation of Algorithms?" by doctoral student Ly Dinh, Informatics doctoral student Janina Sarol, and Diesner.
  • "Beyond Citation: Corpus-Based Methods for Assessing the Impact of Research Outcomes on Society" by Rezapour, Diesner and project collaborators from the Institute for the German Language (IDS), including Jutta Bopp, Norman Fiedler, Diana Steffen, and Andreas Witt.
  • "Assessing Balance in Signed Digraphs by Combining Balance and Transitivity" by Dinh, Rezapour, Diesner, and doctoral student Lan Jiang.
  • "Detecting Characteristics of Cross-Cutting Language Networks on Social Media" by Rezapour, Diesner, and doctoral student Jaihyun Park.
  • "Leveraging Topic Modeling to Enhance the Interpretability of Stance Detection" by doctoral student Apratim Mishra, Rezapour, Park, and Diesner.

Videos of the prerecorded presentations are available on the Social Computing lab website.

Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

iSchool researchers present at ILA 2025

School faculty, staff, and students will present their research at the 2025 Illinois Library Association (ILA) Annual Conference, which will be held on October 14–16 in Rosemont. The theme of this year's conference is "You Belong Here."

Craig named Illinois Library Luminary

Anne Craig, iSchool adjunct lecturer and senior director of the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI), has been inducted as an Illinois Library Luminary. The Illinois Library Luminary program, an initiative of the Illinois Library Association (ILA), recognizes those who have made a significant contribution to Illinois libraries.

Anne Craig

Get to know Manas Godha, growth and strategy lead

Manas Godha (BSIS '24) learned how to connect "different contexts, people, and processes with data and technology" at the iSchool. He is putting those skills into practice in his work as the growth and strategy lead at Advaiya.

Manas Godha

iSchool researchers present at CSCW 2025

Several faculty, students, and recent grads will present their research at the 28th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2025), which will be held October 18–22 in Bergen, Norway. The online portion of the conference will be held on October 10. 

Get to know Jade Carthans, BSIS student

Jade Carthans is interested in how human-centered design, machine learning, and data analytics can come together to solve critical problems that impact organizations and individuals. She gained firsthand experience in these areas through internships with Microsoft and State Farm.

Jade Carthans

School of Information Sciences

501 E. Daniel St.

MC-493

Champaign, IL

61820-6211

Voice: (217) 333-3280

Fax: (217) 244-3302

Email: ischool@illinois.edu

Back to top