iSchool faculty and students will present their research at the 8th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2), which will be held in Chicago on July 19-22. IC2S2 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.
Professor and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Ted Underwood will deliver the keynote, "Approaching Granger Causality for Cultural Change, Very Cautiously." In his talk, he will discuss why it can be challenging to apply computational methods to historical questions that occupy researchers in the humanities.
"A lot of historical change is really generational succession, and the developmental processes that shape a generation are hard to study experimentally," said Underwood. "In a two-year study, you can prove that angry messages on social media get more retweets. But it's hard to study the multi-decade developmental processes that make young people different from their parents."
In addition, iSchool researchers will present the following papers and posters at IC2S2:
- PhD student Kanyao Han, Shadi Rezapour (PhD ’21), and Associate Professor Jana Diesner will present the paper, "An Expert-in-the-Loop Method for Domain-Specific Document Categorization Based on Small Annotated Data," which they coauthored with UIUC Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences colleagues Daniel Miller, Katia Nakamura, and Dikshya Devkota.
- Doctoral candidate Ly Dinh, Informatics PhD student Pingjing Yang, and Diesner will present their paper, "From Plan to Practice: Interorganizational Response Networks Extraction from Emergency Management Plans, Situational Reports, and Tweets about Hurricane Events."
- PhD student Tre Tomaszewski and Assistant Professor Jessie Chin will present their poster, "Shades of Truth: Predicting Veracity of Twitter HPV-Vaccine (Mis)information on a Continuum."
- PhD student Michelle Bak and Chin will present the poster, "Mental Health Pandemic during the COVID-19 Outbreak: Calls for Help on Social Media," which they coauthored with Chungyi Chiu, associate professor of kinesiology and community health at UIUC.
- Bak and Chin will also present the poster, "Representations of Health and Wellness on Instagram: An Analysis of Posting Behavior of Top-Ranked Health Influencers," which they coauthored with Hunter Priniski, PhD student in computational cognition at UCLA. [Honorable Mention]
