10/01: Fall Welcome Mixer

[shevajia]

Comment below with one speaker (and/or a paper by the speaker) whom you wish to see at our workshop.

Please make your comments by Wednesday 11:59 PM, and upvote at least five of your peers' comments on Thursday prior to the workshop. You need to use 'thumbs-up' for your reactions to count towards 'top comments,' but you can use other emojis on top of the thumbs up.

[goldengua]

I would also like to have Dr. Allyson Ettinger as Mint and Harry mentioned. She is a great researcher and her work builds bridges between human and machine languages.

[Panyw97]

I recommend Professor Sendhil Mullainathan from Booth School of business (I saw someone else has recommended him previously) to make a speech in our workshop this quarter. His current research uses machine learning to understand complex problems in human behavior, social policy, and especially medicine, where computational techniques have the potential to uncover biomedical insights from large-scale health data. I took his class last year and found that he is experienced in applying machine learning techniques in social science research. One of his working papers A Probabilistic Model of Cardiac Physiology and Electrocardiograms is interesting and I really hope to listen to his insights and ideas.

[AlexPrizzy]

I would very much like to see Christos Papadimiriou from Columbia university, his team created Assembly Calculus, a computational model for the operation of assembles of neurons. It is some times referred to as the possible link between mind and brain, as it can be used to study brain processes such as learning or production of language. Here is the paper A Calculus for Brain Computation

[vinsonyz]

Professor Matthew Gentzkow, Professor of Economics at Stanford University. He studies applied microeconomics with a focus on media industries. It would be great if Professor Gentzkow can have a talk about his recent research and the future of Economics research.

[Anqi-Zhou]

Why not Professor Kremer? He just joined our university. It would be so great to listen to his opinions and research on property reduction or education economics.

[NikkiTing]

I would like to hear from Prof. Tarek Alexander Hassan or any of his colleagues on their paper entitled, "Firm-Level Exposure to Epidemic Diseases: Covid-19, SARS, and H1N1", which used text-based analysis to assess the impact of COVID-19 on firms.

[weijiexu-charlie]

I would like to have Professor Allyson Ettinger, who is a great researcher in computational linguistics and cognitive science. I would also want to have Professor Ted Gibson from MIT. The work of his lab used both experimental and computational methods to answer (1) why human languages look the way they do; (2) the relationship between culture and cognition, including language; and, most generally, (3) how people learn, represent and process language.

[NaiyuJ]

I would highly recommend Professor Katherine Milkman at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

She employs big data and field experiments to study how people can make optimal choices and how to improve human decision making.

Professor Milkman made lots of wonderful speeches, and was voted Wharton’s “Iron Prof” by MBA students for a PechaKucha-style presentation of her research topics.

One thing I love the most is that her papers are continuing to reach beyond academia, providing insights to many real-world problems. As far as I know, she is conducting a mega-study to improve flu vaccination rates this year!

[Yilun0221]

I am really interested in Professor Helen Margetts and her research about big data and politics. To be specific, her research called Data Financing for Global Good: A Feasibility Study really attacts my attention, and it will be a good opportunity to hear more details. The reason is that it is the first time that I see research discussing about the data financing and integrating data financing into social mechanism.

[ziwnchen]

I would like to recommend Prof. Christopher Andrew Bail. He is a leading computational social scientist from Duke University. His research focuses on political tribalism, extremism, and social psychology using data from social media. He just published an interesting book Measuring Culture which systematically review the measurement of the cultural meaning-making process.

[lyl010]

I would recommend Dr. Penny Mealy. Penny is a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of New Economic in Oxford and her research interest are division of labour, economic complexity, technological evolution, transformational change, network science and agent-based modeling. Penny is also an interesting and clear speaker.

[afchao]

It would be amazing if we had the opportunity to hear from Sebastian Seung; he is perhaps most famous for Eyewire, which is a game developed to crowdsource the mapping of human retinal neurons. Although he may have plenty to discuss on the topic of social computing given the success with which his lab employs it, his interests range far into the realm of neuroimaging, and specifically connectomics . If realized in humans, connectome-based approaches to neuroscience could enable an unprecedented level of understanding about how structure and function are related in the brain.

[j2401]

It would be nice if Hirokazu Shirado could be our guest speaker! His recent paper studies how individuals cooperate and coordinate using a human network and a set of bots.

“His experiments have contributed primarily to the field of sociology and human-computer interactions, but they are also relevant to sub-fields related to network science, evolutionary ecology, behavioral economics, organizational theory, and public health.” (quote from his Bio- page)

[Rui-echo-Pan]

I would recommend Prof. Li'an Zhou, professor of Guanghua School of Management at Peking University. His research involves applied microeconomics, industrial organization, economic development, and political economy.

[MengChenC]

I would love to see if Jeff Dean, a computer scientist, who currently leads Google AI division, can come and give us an address. Mr. Dean was elected a member to the National Academy of Engineering in 2009 for working on "the science and engineering of large-scale distributed computer systems." Besides, he also holds the fellowship in the Association for Computing Machinery and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He is working on developing and supervising artificial intelligence systems these years. However, he has designed computational tools for different fields such as information retrieval, statistical modeling software, and pandemic forecasting program. The renowned projects regarding data analysis include Spanner, BigTable, MapReduce, and TensorFlow. Each project has revolutionary effects to relevant fields and industries.

[adarshmathew]

Yes, this is more of a bucket list than one of suggestions. Give me all the upvotes, just for the length of it all. Don't fall prey to the sorting schema of GitHub.

Researchers in the Algorithmic Bias space:

• Dr. Ruha Benjamin (Princeton) and/or Dr. Safiya Noble (UCLA) for their work on examining the intersection of tech platforms and class, race, gender. I'd highly recommend their books. And to echo @chrismaurice0's point, their work examining the impact of algorithms and platforms on the marginalized is highly important at this moment. (Dr. Zeynep Tufekci (UNC) would be a great addition too.)
• Dr. Rediet Abebe (Cornell), for her methodological focus on algorithms and equity/justice
• Dr. Sinan Aral (MIT) for his book, "The Hype Machine"

Disinformation Researchers:

• Renee DiResta for her work with DARPA and the Stanford Internet Observatory.
• Dr. Kate Starbird (UofWashington) as mentioned by @rkcatipon
• Yoel Roth (Twitter, Head of Site Integrity). He could talk about how Twitter deals with this, and what academic research they do internally.
• Becca Lewis (Stanford) for her excellent work cataloguing right-wing radicalization and influencer culture -- the politics of tech & media.

Philosophers of Science:

• Dr. Cailin O'Çonnor (UC Irvine) for her work on formal models of knowledge in communities
• Dr. Kevin Zollman (CMU) for his work on network epistemology

Within UChicago:

• Dr. Luis Bettencourt
• Dr. John Levi Martin
• Dr. Anjali Adukia
• Dr. Chenhao Tan

CSS Stalwarts:

• Dr. Susan Athey, for all her brilliant work trying to bridge the worlds of causal inference and deep learning.
• Dr. Chris Bail
• Dr. Noshir Contractor

Representing Silicon Valley:

• Dr. Hanna Wallach (Microsoft)
• Dr. Pablo Barbera, (Facebook, USC)
• Dr. Alex Leavitt (Facebook)
• Dr. Alex Hanna (Google)
• Yoel Roth (Twitter)

[luxin-tian]

I would recommend Tatyana Deryugina, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Finance at the UIUC. Her research focuses on environmental, public, and behavioral economics, especially on impacts of natural disasters and how these are mediated by social policy and disaster aid. Her paper Does When You Die Depend on Where You Live? Evidence from Hurricane Katrina has be recently published on AER.

[ginxzheng]

I would be extremely happy to see Sharad Goel, Assistant Professor at Department of Management Science & Engineering at Stanford. He directed the Stanford Computational Policy Lab, and it would be great if I can hear from his research on policing practices.

Also, a strong upvote to Professor Susan Athey at Stanford, which has been raised up already. I've been long admiring her work on social impact, which is exactly yielding what we're doing can contribute to the society.

[ddlee19]

I would recommend Adam Grant as a speaker. Professor Grant teaches at the management department at Wharton. He's been Wharton's top-rated professor for seven straight years, and his book Originals - a collection of case studies on how novel ideas are birthed in organizations - was a New York Times Best Seller and one of my favorite reads. I would love to hear him speak about a research project he's done which required more computational methods.

Here's a link to his bio: https://mgmt.wharton.upenn.edu/profile/grantad/

[Tanzi11]

• I would love to see artist Ekene Ijeoma who heads the Poetic Justice group at MIT Media Lab, and combines his research on inequality and computational design to create artwork.

• Another individual would be Professor Sandra González-Bailón who leads the research group DiMeNet (Digital Media, Networks, and Political Communication) at the Annenberg School of Communication. Her book Decoding the Social World is about understanding the society as "an organism susceptible to contagion." (The trailer explains it way better.)

• Finally, Lada Adamic who is a computational social scientist at Facebook who studies crowdsourced knowledge-sharing and used to teach at the University of Michigan. I am interested because she writes children's books and at the same time, appears mysterious.

[Leahjl]

I would like to see Devin Pope, who studies variety of topics at the intersection of economics and psychology.

[Jasmine97Huang]

It would be great to hear from Tristan Harris, a former Design Ethicist at Google and co-founder/president of Center for Humane Technology- a NPO focusing on the ethics of consumer technology. He would offer some very interesting insights on how data are used in the industry and the ethical issues of data privacy.

[lihanhuisherry]

I'd also like to see Margaret Roberts. I read her book Censored and was amazed by her acuteness in observing the public opinions on Chinese social media through rigorous statistical analysis.

[TwoCentimetre]

I want to see Lars Peter Hansen, who is a famous professor in econ department at UChicago. He focuses on computational macroeconomics and finance, and I am curious about how computational skills could be applied in these areas. He is also a Nobel laureate.

[SoyBison]

I would suggest Lore Goetschalckx, she does work on using GANs to get a better hold on what makes something memorable. I highly checking out the instrumentation of her model here. The long and short of it is, it makes things look pretty, it makes things look big, and it makes things look horrifying. here's an example of all three in reverse order, for these examples, the input image is in the middle: Horrifying. Look now the dog takes up the whole dang picture! Unripe pepper to a ripe pepper (still kinda the wrong shape but you get the idea).

Clearly it took a true genius to make this model, and that's why we should have her come give a talk even though she's not famous.

[XinSu6]

I recommend professor Geoffrey R. Stone, Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago. I read about some of his articles and found a lot of his ideas fascinating. This is his introduction: https://www.law.uchicago.edu/faculty/stone-g

Margaret E. Roberts is also a great one for me and I saw someone recommended her already. I enjoyed the censorship articles from her.

[xzmerry]

I want to recommend Susan Athey. She is the Economics of Technology Professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and her research currently focuses on the economics of digitization, marketplace design, and the intersection of econometrics and machine learning. I would recommend her paper with Stefan Wager, Estimation and Inference of Heterogeneous Treatment Effects using Random Forests.

Her researches combine causal inference and machine learning (and I remember her husband is a prof focuses on machine learning). I think how she conducts those interdisciplinary studies would be inspirational for us.

[yierrr]

Prof Iris Bohnet please! She is an amazing behavioral economist focusing on gender and cross-cultural topics and engaging in multitudes of programs advocating for gender equality—female students pursing careers in the academia can always benefit from listening to female professors!

[minminfly68]

@Raychanan Second on nomination on Dr. Zhang. She is pretty nice, and she has just joined CUNY as faculty member, I think. But still ask if we can invite Gary King again, and he is a super excellent speaker as shown last year. Thx!

[yierrr]

Prof Nava Ashraf please! She is a great behavioral economist whose interests include technology adoption (corresponding to CSS probably), and she is also involved at an anti-poverty lab—just like Prof Kremer that just joined U of C. And also she is based in the UK—what is a better opprtunity to have her than inviting her to talk when everything is going on remotely?

[timqzhang]

Professor Daron Acemoğlu, one famous economist in political economy and macroeconomics. His career path and his productive academic live drive me to not only learn from him on economics, but also curious of how he becomes what he is right now.

[WMhYang]

I would like to recommend Prof. Gautam Rao. His research field intersects behavioral economics and development economics. I find the idea fascinating that explaining poverty through the lens of cognitive functions and mental developments. In addition, he is an expert in designing and conducting field experiments.

[skanthan95]

I want to recommend Dr. David Bamman. His work develops statistical models of the world through what people say about it through text - particularly, natural language processing for Latin and Greek through treebank construction, computational lexicography, morphological tagging, and word sense disambiguation. I was really impressed with his body of work, which covers a topic that we haven’t yet explored in the workshop!

[Lynx-jr]

I would like to recommend Margaret Roberts as well. Used to listen to one of her speeches and it somehow sparked my interest in content analysis.

I think Margaret Roberts from UC San Diego would be a great speaker. She uses methods of automated content analysis to study censorship and propaganda in China. Her research addresses questions like what kind of content is more likely to be censored online or what news content is driven by the state or by the market.

[mingtao-gao]

I would like to recommend Professor Gunter Hitsch, from Booth. His recent research focuses on the application and development of ideas from the machine learning and causal inference literatures in marketing and industrial organization, including customer-targeting and optimal pricing. I found this very interesting to me and I would like to hear from him.

[YaoYao121]

I hope to see Dr.Winnie Van Dijk. She is now a postdoctoral fellow in the department of Economics at Harvard. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago. Her research field is labor economics, public economics and applied econometrics. She focuses on topics like wealth inequality, determinants of poverty and the evaluation and design of social policies. Here is her working papers.

[97seshu]

I would like to see Professor Fei-Fei Li, a distinguished AI expert at Stanford University. For a long time, AI researchers had focused on improving the accuracy of image recognition by optimizing algorithms alone. Professor Fei-Fei Li, on the other hand, calls attention to the importance of having training datasets with great quality and large quantity. She created the ImageNet platform which provides millions of cataloged images for researchers to fine-tune their AI algorithms. She has made a significant contribution to improving computer vision. Currently, her studies focus on applying computer vision to healthcare.

[caibengbu]

I would recommend Tatyana Deryugina, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Finance at the UIUC. Her research focuses on environmental, public, and behavioral economics, especially on impacts of natural disasters and how these are mediated by social policy and disaster aid. Her paper Does When You Die Depend on Where You Live? Evidence from Hurricane Katrina has be recently published on AER.

I second this

[hihowme]

I would really want to see Susan Athey in the workshop. As an economist, she did lots of research using the computational methods like machine learning and deep learning to solve the economics problem. She also did lots of work on promoting the computational methods in economics, check this out for more information on the application of machine learning in economics:https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/pegroup/files/athey2018.pdf

[chentian418]

I would love to see Professor Marco Di Maggio, an associate professor at Harvard Business School. His research interests includes macro-finance, corporate finance, and household finance, and his current research focuses on financial intermediation with a particular focus on how new technologies have disrupted financial markets and its effects on firms and individuals. You could find some featured work of him here.

[chuqingzhao]

I would like to see Professor Amir Goldberg, a computational sociology at Stanford University. His work use natural language processing and network analysis to model cultural dynamics in organizations, markets and social groups.

I also hope to see Professor Dashun Wang at the Kellogg School of Management. He is one of the leading researchers in science of science and complex system. His recent research focus on develop tools from complexity sciences and artificial intelligence to broadly explore the opportunities offered by data explosion in science. I think it would be a great opportunity for macss students to learn more about perspectives and future of computational social sciences.

I would also strongly upvote for Professor Susan Athey and Professor Michal Kosinski!

[fyzh-git]

Professor Susan Athey from Stanford GSB, the recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal, also the former chief economist at Microsoft. She is a leading professor in the computational economics. Although at first Prof. Hal Ronald Varian motivated me into this area, it is Prof. Susan Athey that makes me determined to along the path explore and promote the intersection of Econ and CS. Her research includes but not limited to the economics of the internet, platform competition, online advertising auctions and advertiser behavior, financial technology, the impact of the internet and social media on consumer behavior, and new econometric methods for analyzing big data.

[YileC928]

I would recommend Professor Dashun Wang, who is currently an associate professor of Management and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management and a core faculty at the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO). His research interest lies in the Science of Science, Complex Systems, and Social Networks. He has recently revealed an upcoming new book called the Science of Science, which I would really hope to see him share in the workshop. Besides, he also works closely with Professor James Evans and the knowledge lab; they have co-authored several papers that really fascinated me, for example, the well known "Large teams develop and small teams disrupt science and technology" and the recent project in The Tipping Point Between Success and Failure.

[Yiqing-Zh]

I'd like to see Professor Amy Finkelstein who is a professor from the Department of Economics at MIT. Professor Finkelstein has contributed a lot to health economics and also leads a large experiment on health insurance. I think her work will inspire us a lot about the health care system and its causal effects.

[YanjieZhou]

I am personally interested in psychology and would like to see top psychological researchers to come to our workshop. Thus, I recommend Prof. Laura Carstensen at Stanford, whoc is a great professor in psychological research.

[chiayunc]

Daniel Martin Katz from IIT. He applies a wide range of machine learning methods to study legal problems. While most empirical legal studies focus on inference, he has done innovative work in predicting legal decisions. He also has experience in crowdsourcing and NLP. While these may be quite common for social sciences, they are definitely new in the legal area.

[anqi-hu]

I would like to see Professor Matthew J. Salganik from Princeton, the author of Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age. He recently coauthored an article on the new challenges in computational social science and provided several recommendations that might help mitigate these problems. See the article here.

[hhx2207061197]

I would like to see Professor Xiao Liu at NYU Stern, who applies parallel computing techniques to data on a large scale and multimedia tools to unstructured data to study the marketing problems.

[YuxinNg]

Professor Gary King at Harvard again! Last time we invited him, he gave an excellent presentation! Really hope that we can have him again to introduce more of his works!

[YijingZhang-98]

Lillian Lee, professor of computer science from Cornell University. She specialized in researching social interactions using NLP technology. An intriguing finding in her recent paper reviews that the questions journalists ask male players focused more on the game than female players, which indicates the gender bias in sports journalism.