I’m an assistant professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University where I run the Network Dynamics Lab.
In my research, I’m interested in using online social data to measure and predict large-scale human behavior.
News
2013.02.28 – Public Safety Canada funds project researching disaster management
The funding received will support work into monitoring and measuring large-scale responses on Twitter to man-made and natural disasters, aiming to improve government response and support.
2012.12.22 – Paper accepted to CompleNet 2013
Our paper explores the idea of how robustly controllable networks are, offering a new way of understanding the structure of real and random networks.
2012.11.21 – Paper accepted to BMC Bioinformatics
The accepted paper performs the first comprehensive study of the role of different topological features in biological robustness. Congratulations to first author, Faiyaz Zamal!
2012.11.16 – Twitter workshop accepted to the Sunbelt Social Networks Conference
The accepted tutorial, “Studying human behavior on Twitter,” will cover everything from collecting tweets through analyzing content and networks.
2012.11.07 – Paper accepted to Symposium on Analyzing Microtext
Our accepted paper is called “What’s in a name? Using first names as features for gender inference in Twitter.” Congrats to first author, Wendy Liu!
2012.11.04 – Released interactive website: 2012 US Election in Tweets
We mined 10+ million tweets talking about the US presidential election and evaluated the relative popularity of different topics and candidates.
2012.10.11 – Paper on submission flows published in Science
Our paper analyzed the late submission history of 80,000+ articles and found, among other things, evidence that peer-review works: formerly rejected papers process garnered more citations.
2012.09.29 – Presented posters at WIN 2012
I presented results for two separate projects done by two of my students on demographic inference on Twitter and studies of how people interpret network visualizations.
2012.09.13 – Released iPhone 5 infographic
Two of my students, Raviv and Morgane, and I conducted an analysis of the response of Twitter users to the iPhone 5 announcement event.
2012.07.02 – Invited talk @ NEH Seminar
2012.06.16 – Talk @ Political Networks Conference
Talk on how FEC campaign contribution data can be used to learn about how members of different occupations give differently (e.g., scales of contributions, candidates, and timing).
2012.06.08 – Talk @ Canadian Government Security Round-table
Invited talk entitled “Social Media and Social Mobilization” at the Cross-cultural Security Roundtable organized by Public Safety Canada.
2012.06.07 – Launched ICWSM Data Sharing Initiative
As co-Data Chair for ICWSM this year, I launched a service so that authors of papers published at ICWSM can share their datasets through an ICWSM-run service.
2012.06.04 – Talk and poster @ ICWSM
2012.05.30 – Computational Social Science Workshop @ Harvard
I ran a full day workshop/tutorial on using Twitter for studying social and political phenomena. We covered everything from how to collect data to how to measure sentiment of tweets.
2012.05.09 – Talk @ Sage Workshop
Presented the Zen python network library to the Sage community.
2012.04.23 – Biological Control Workshop @ Bellairs Research Institute
With Mathieu Blanchette and Jackie Vogel, ran a week-long workshop on the control and biological systems ranging from subcellular machinery all the way up to ecosystems.
