Jana Diesner

Human-centered data science, computational social science, network science, natural language processing, machine learning, data regulations, crisis informatics, impact assessment.

• Leadership Academy Fellow for underrepresented leaders in STEM higher education, awarded by National Alliance for Inclusive & Diverse STEM Faculty (ASPIRE), 2020
• R.C. Evans Data Analytics Fellow, University of Illinois-Deloitte Foundation Center for Business Analytics, 2018
• CIO Scholar for Information Research & Technology, 2018
• Linowes Fellowship, Cline Center for Advanced Social Research, Illinois, 2018
• Dori J. Maynard Senior Fellow, The Center for Investigative Reporting and The Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, 2016
• Faculty Fellow, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), 2015
• Siebel Scholarship, awarded annually for academic excellence and demonstrated leadership to 80 top students from the world’s leading graduate schools ($35,000), 2011

Jana Diesner is a full professor at the Technical University of Munich, School of Social Science and Technology. There, she leads the Human Centered Computing group. Her interdisciplinary group works on methods from network analysis, natural language processing, machine learning and AI, and integrates them with theories from the social sciences to advance our knowledge about complex societal systems and responsible computing. Before joining TU Munich in 2024, she was a tenured professor at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. Jana earned her PhD at Carnegie Mellon, School of Computer Science.

• Summer 2025 - Independent Study - IS189JD
• Summer 2025 - Independent Study - IS389JD

Mishra, S., Fegley, B.D., Diesner, J., & Torvik, V.I. (2018). Self-citation is the hallmark of productive authors, of any gender. PLoS ONE, 13(9): e0195773. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0195773
 
Kim, J., & Diesner, J. (2015). Distortive effects of initial-based name disambiguation on measurements of large-scale coauthorship networks. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), 67(6), 1446-1461. doi: 10.1002/asi.23489
 
Diesner, J. (2015) Small decisions with big impact on data analytics. Big Data & Society, 2(2). doi: 10.1177/2053951715617185
 
Jeoung, S., Ge, Y., & Diesner, J. (2023). StereoMap: How Stereotypes in Large Language Models resemble Human-like Stereotypes. In Proceedings of Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language (EMNLP), Singapore.
 
Dinh, L., Kulkarni, S., Yang, P., & Diesner, J. (2022). Reliability of Methods for Extracting Collaboration Networks from Crisis-related Situational Reports and Tweets. Proceedings of Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM). 
 
Sarol, J., Dinh, L., & Diesner, J. (2021). Variation in situational awareness information due to selection of data source, summarization method, and method implementation. Proceedings of International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM).
 
Sarol, J., Dinh, L., Rezapour, R., Chin, C., Yang, P., & Diesner, J. (2020). An empirical methodology for detecting and prioritizing needs during crisis events. Findings of ACL: Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language (EMNLP) (held online). doi: 10.18653/v1/2020.findings-emnlp.366
 
Rezapour, R., Bopp, J., Fiedler, N., Steffen, D., Witt A., & Diesner, J. (2020). Beyond citation: corpus-based methods for assessing the impact of research outcomes on society. Proceedings of 12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC).
 
Rezapour, R., & Diesner, J. (2017). Classification and detection of micro-level impact of issue-focused films based on reviews. Proceedings of 20th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW), (pp. 1419-1431), Portland, OR. doi: 10.1145/2998181.2998201 
 

5th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2), Amsterdam, Netherlands: “Responsible Social Computing: Validating Network Data and Theory” (2019)

Digital Humanities in D-A-CH (DHd), Frankfurt, Germany: “Understanding Social Structure and Behavior through Responsible Mixed-Methods Research: Bias Detection, Theory Validation, and Data Governance” (2019)

European Computational Social Science Symposium (EuroCSS), Workshop on Reframing Research, Cologne, Germany: “Responsible Social Computing: Validating Network Data and Theory” (2018)

Annual Conference of the German Association for Network Research (DGNet), Darmstadt, Germany: “Responsible Social Computing” (2018)

Ethics in a Data-Driven World Symposium, Deloitte Foundation Center for Business Analytics, UIUC: “Practical Ethics and Responsible Computing” (2018)

Historical Network Research (HNR) Conference, Brno, Czech Republic: “Bias Detection and Theory Validation in Social Network Analysis” (2018)

Collaborative Research on Extreme Scale Text Analytics (CRESTA) Workshop, UIUC: “Human Centered Computing: Innovating compliantly and transparently” (2018)

Keynote talk: COINs (Collaborative Innovation Networks) Conference, Rome, Italy: Words and Networks: Using Natural Language Processing to Enhance Graphs and Test Network Theories (2016)

Keynote talk: GOR (General Online Research) Conference, Dresden, Germany: Rich and Reliable Signals: Making Responsible Choices for Working with Social Interaction Data (2016)

Keynote talk: NetGlow Conference, Saint-Petersburg, Russia: Socio-semantic network (2014)

Keynote talk: Ditact Conference – women’s IT studies, University Salzburg, Austria: Computational Thinking in the playroom, classroom, boardroom (2014)

Keynote talk: DISC (Daegu International Social Network Conference), Daegu, South Korea: Words and Networks (2013)

Keynote talk: Future of Historical Network Research Conference, Hamburg, Germany: Of micro-scopes and telescopes in the digital humanities and computational social sciences (2013)

Invited talk: European Forum Alpbach, Austria: Computational Problem Solving: Transformative Progress and Key Issues ?with Human Centered Data Science (2016)

Invited talk: IT Defense Conference, Frankfurt, Germany: Network Analysis and Text Mining for Detecting and Examining the Structure, Functioning and Evolution of Covert Networks (2011)

Invited talk: Sundance Institute, Creative Producing Summit: Impact Assessment of Social Justice Documentaries (2013)

Invited talk: Open Science Conference, Berlin, Germany: Innovating compliantly and transparently - road blocks, myths and solutions (2017)