| Title | : | On the Role of Valence in Public Health Surveillance and Response |
| Speaker | : | Srinivasan Parthasarathy (Ohio State University) |
| Details | : | Tue, 19 Dec, 2017 11:00 AM @ A M Turing Hall |
| Abstract: | : | Public health response to mental and behavioural issues, epidemics and disasters depend on large-scale, informed and skills-driven human efforts. Increasingly, social-media data and the information they yield can play a key role in predicting, understanding and responding to mental and behavioural health issues, epidemics and disasters, but require technological advances to glean insight from the hidden patterns it contains to improve situational awareness impacting health response activities. Specifically, in this talk, I will focus on the role of valence and pragmatics in two such contexts. First, I will discuss a domain-guided computational model to infer a model of trust among users within a social network during emergent situations, and the role of affective valence on the underlying model. Evaluations on real-world events suggest that incorporating valence is a key factor in realizing a stable model. Second, I will discuss an observational study we conducted to examine if one can identify relevant signals from social media exchanges to detect symptomatic cues of clinical depression and the role played by valence and emotional signals. Our findings corroborate well with offline studies in clinical psychology and social sciences.
Bio: Srinivasan Parthasarathy is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and the director of the data mining research laboratory at Ohio State. His research interests span databases, data mining and high-performance computing. He is among a handful of researchers nationwide to have won both the Department of Energy and National Science Foundation Career awards. He and his students have won multiple best paper awards or best of nominations from leading forums in the field including SIAM Data Mining, ACM SIGKDD, VLDB, ISMB, WWW, ICDM, and ACM Bioinformatics. He chairs the SIAM data mining conference steering committee and serves on the action board of ACM TKDD and ACM DMKD, leading journals in the field. Since 2012 he also helped lead the creation of OSUs first-of-a-kind nationwide (US) undergraduate major in data analytics and serves as one of its founding directors. |
