At the PITT Computational Social Dynamics Lab (PICSO LAB), we are working toward modeling and analyzing patterns of change within complex social systems, with a focus on patterns of change that emerge from citizen activities, interactions and relationships, and their sensemaking processes.
Our research mission is to use data, big and small, in the service of humanity. Our goal is to empirically study how social systems change and the phenomena of change in society, with behavioral and network data. Our methods include computational approaches such as network analysis and modeling, text mining, and data visualization, as well as qualitative and mixed-methods approaches. Topics of interest include event analytics and modeling, community analysis, self-organizing behaviors in socio-technical systems, and community resilience and sustainability.
The Principal Investigator, Yu-Ru Lin, Associate Professor at the School of Computing and Information, University of Pittsburgh, started this group at 2013. She is a computer scientist by training, with research interests include data science, visualization, and computational social science.