Members of Associate Professor Jana Diesner's Social Computing Lab will present two posters at the 11th Annual Maritime Risk Symposium, which is being held virtually from October 26-30. The symposium, hosted by the Critical Infrastructure Resilience Institute (CIRI), will focus on maritime resilience and the impact of COVID-19 with regard to resiliency for future global upsets.
PhD student Ly Dinh will present the poster, "Interorganizational Collaboration Networks During 2018 Hurricane Michael Response," which she coauthored with Ikenna Akuba, an undergraduate in economics minoring in informatics, and Associate Professor Jana Diesner. For their study, the researchers examined interdependences among local, state, federal, business, and volunteer organizations during Hurricane Michael. Their results show that "identifying relevant entities and their interactions during response processes may help responders reflect on collaboration patterns that were helpful in mitigating risks and damages."
Informatics PhD student Pingjing Yang will present the poster, "Annotation Guidelines for Entity Tagging and Semantic Role Labeling of Disaster-Related Text Documents," which he coauthored with Dinh, Diesner, and Janina Sarol, a PhD student in informatics. The poster describes a codebook the researchers developed to annotate key information regarding collaborations and resource allocations from situational reports of the 2010 Haiti earthquake. According to the researchers, the annotated data can be used to develop applications that automatically extract collaboration and resource networks from situational reports, which can inform policy assessment.
Diesner's research in human-centered data science and responsible computing combines the benefits of machine learning, AI, network analysis and natural language processing with the consideration of social science theories, social contexts, and ethical concerns. She leads the Social Computing Lab at the iSchool. Diesner received her PhD from Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science.