Diesner lab presents research at Maritime Risk Symposium

Jana Diesner
Jana Diesner, Affiliate Associate Professor

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.

Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

iSchool researchers work with diverse groups to improve user experience

iSchool faculty are studying ways to improve user experience, with a common goal of improving technology and applications for the needs of individual users. These researchers are working with diverse groups to gain feedback, and several current projects are focused on experiences for users with disabilities.

Das receives student membership award from ASIS&T

PhD student Puranjani Das has been selected as a recipient of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) SIG CMR Student Membership Award for the 2024-2025 academic year. She will receive a complimentary one-year membership in both ASIS&T and SIG CMR, a special interest group focused on classification and metadata research.

Puranjani Das

Kim defends dissertation

Doctoral candidate Jenna Kim successfully defended her dissertation, "Evaluating Pre-Trained Language Modeling Approaches for Author Name Disambiguation," on June 11, 2024.

Jenna Kim headshot

Desai defends dissertation

Doctoral candidate Smit Desai successfully defended his dissertation, "Designing Metaphor-fluid Voice User Interfaces," on June 10.

Smit Desai

Student says ‘thank you’ with a helicopter ride

Last month, Michael Ferrer showed appreciation for one of his MSIM instructors in a unique way—by inviting him for an insider’s look at his work as a reservist in the Illinois Army National Guard. For the ILARNG BOSS Lift, which took place on June 18 at Camp Atterbury, Indiana, Ferrer selected Michael Wonderlich, iSchool adjunct lecturer and senior associate director of business intelligence and enterprise architecture for Administrative Information Technology Services (AITS) at the University of Illinois.

Michael Wonderlich and Michael Ferrer hold a U of I flag in front of a military helicopter