Department of Computer Science organises Seminar “Data Science as an Interdisciplinary Tool: The Impact on Social Sciences”.
Speaker: Dr. Ioannis Katakis, faculty member, Department of Computer Science, University of Nicosia
Abstract:
A large number of contemporary research questions require the interdisciplinary skills of computer and social scientists. The data revolution along with a plethora of easy-to-access machine learning and artificial intelligence tools bring the two communities together and enable them to work on problems with high societal impact. In this talk, we will investigate a number of such problems and discuss the shifting paradigm of developing machine learning algorithms for understanding social structures and dynamics. Our case study is based on a sentiment analysis method that detects domain-specific opinion words through analyzing natural language. We illustrate how these tools are utilized to understand social phenomena like the linguistic bias in Wikipedia, the dynamics of political networks on Twitter and citizen choices in voting advice applications.
Speaker’s Short Bio:
Dr Ioannis Katakis is a Faculty Member and co-director of the Artificial Intelligence Lab (ailab.unic.ac.cy) at the University of Nicosia. Born and raised in Thessaloniki, Greece, studied Computer Science and holds a PhD in Machine Learning for Text Classification. After his post-graduate studies, he served various universities as a lecturer and a senior researcher. His research interests include Mining Social, Web and Urban Data, Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining, Deep Learning, Data Streams, Multi-label Learning. He has extensive experience in European Projects (www.vavel-project.eu, www.insight-ict.eu) where he participated as Quality Assurance Coordinator and Senior Researcher. He published papers in International Conferences and Scientific Journals related to his areas of expertise (e.g. ICDE, CIKM, ECML/PKDD, IEEE TKDE, ECAI), organized three workshops (at ICML, ECML/PKDD, EDBT/ICDT), edited four special issues (DAMI, InfSys) and is an Editor at the journal Information Systems. His research has been cited more than 4400 times in the literature. He regularly serves the programme committee of conferences (ECML/PKDD, WSDM, DEBS, IJCAI) and evaluates articles in numerous journals (TPAMI, DMKD, TKDE, TKDD, JMLR, TWEB, ML).
