“Making Sense of Human Behavior in the Real World with Large-scale, Geolocated Data”

Location: LTS Auditorium, 8080 Greenmead Drive

Speaker:
Vanessa Frias-Martinez
Assistant Professor, UMD iSchool, and Affiliate Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science

Abstract:
The pervasiveness of cell phones and social media is generating vast amounts of information that can help us reveal a wide range of human behavior. From mobility patterns to social connections, these signals expose insights about how humans behave and interact with their environment.

In this talk, I will present several projects that focus on the design of algorithms and methods to model how humans interact with, react to, communicate about, and sense their environment.

Finally, I will also discuss possible uses of our findings in areas such as urban planning, disaster management, epidemiology or poverty studies.

Bio:
Vanessa Frias-Martinez is an assistant professor in the UMD iSchool and an affiliate assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science.

She is the director of the Urban Computing Lab and a member of the Computational Linguistics and Information Processing (CLIP) Lab, the Center for Geospatial Information Science, and the Maryland Population Research Center.

Frias-Martinez’s research focuses on applying data mining, machine learning and natural language processing techniques to analyze human behavior in the physical world.

From 2009 to 2013, she was a researcher in the Data Mining and User Modeling Group at Telefonica Research in Madrid, Spain. Her research is funded by the National Science Foundation and the World Bank.

She received her doctoral degree in computer science from Columbia University in 2008.