PICSO: Archived Lab News & Research Highlights

2021/03 Our paper received the Best Paper Award for 2020 in ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems. Congrats to Yongsu! The award committee recognized our "Policy Flow: Interpreting Policy Diffusion in Context" as "... this paper demonstrates the advantages of interactive visual analytics for understanding the policy adoption and exemplifies the two key characteristics of an interactive intelligent system: intelligence and interactivity." Read more about the award and the paper.

2020/10 Paper accepted to appear in COLING 2020: "Inflating Topic Relevance with Ideology: A Case Study of Political Ideology Bias in Social Topic Detection Models." This work highlights the susceptibility of large, complex models to propagating the biases from input, leading to a deterioration of retrieval accuracy, and the importance of controlling for these biases. As a way to mitigate the bias, we propose to learn a text representation that is invariant to political ideology while still judging topic relevance.

2020/10 Congrats to Ang, for her paper with Rosta and collaborators receiving Honorable Mention Award from CSCW 2020!

2020/08 Paper accepted to appear in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications: "The dynamics of Twitter users' gun narratives across major mass shooting events." This article reveals how cross-cutting political talks about guns and gun policies happened on Twitter in a time of mass shootings.

2020/08 Paper accepted to appear in Big Data Research: "Data-Driven Computational Social Science: A Survey." This article presents a survey on data-driven computational social science, focusing on the state-of-the-art research on human dynamics from three aspects: individuals, relationships, and collectives.

2020/07 Paper accepted to appear in IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics (JBHI): "StoCast: Stochastic Disease Forecasting with Progression Uncertainty." Congrats to Xian for publishing a new journal article! This work presents a new deep generative learning framework to deal with the uncertainty scenarios often seen in medical and other time-evolving datasets. The code is available at our github page

2020/06 Paper accepted to appear in ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (TiiS): "PolicyFlow: Interpreting Policy Diffusion in Context." Congrats to Yongsu for publishing a new journal article! This new visualization combines text and network analyses to help understand the diffusion of laws and regulations across political boundaries in the US.

2020/03 Yongsu's research was highlighted in the DATA STORIES podcast and there is also an interview featuring our IEEE VIS paper. The story is called "Visualizing Fairness in Machine Learning." The story introduced how visualization can play a role in its detection and mitigation in the world of "machine bias."

2020/01 Congrats to Ang, Kai and Muheng, for their papers accepted to appear in The Web Conference 2020!

2019/11 Congratulations to Xidao and Mert for successfully defending their PhD dissertations!

2019/05 Our new paper on opioid prediction was covered by VentureBeat: "AI can predict opioid overdoses from crime and socioeconomic data".

2019/02 Paper accepted to appear at EPJ Data Science Journal: "Activism via Attention: Interpretable Spatiotemporal Learning to Forecast Protest Activities." Congrats to Mert and the team! The deep learning code used in this paper is available at the github page.

2018/02 Paper accepted to appear in ACM TKDD: "Event Analytics via Discriminant Tensor Factorization."

2017/11 Paper published at EPJ Data Science Journal: "Measuring and monitoring collective attention during shocking events." Check out the SpringerOpen blog post that featured this article. The dataset associated with our findings has been released.

2017/11 Dr. Adam Perer to visit us and speak in Big Data Colloquium Series on November 17, 2017.

2017/11 Code release -- MTHL (Multi-view Time-Series Hypersphere Learning) for detecting anomalous patterns from dynamic and multi-attributed networks. Check out the github page and our paper!

2017/10 Dr. Dan Cosley to visit us and speak in Big Data Colloquium Series on October 27, 2017.

2017/10 Our studies (about fear & distress) were cited by an article in Las Vegas Sun to explain how the latest mass shooting in Las Vegas could trigger many's lasting emotional reactions regardless of where they live.

2017/10 The paper "Quantifying Content Polarization on Twitter" won the Best Student Paper Award in CIC 2017. Congrats to Muheng and Xidao!

2017/09 Dr. Leman Akoglu to visit us and speak in Big Data Colloquium Series on September 29, 2017.

2017/09 Congratulations to Xian for receiving travel awards from NSF/SIGWEB/SIGIR to attend CIKM 2017!

2017/05 Congratulations to Xidao Wen for successfully defending his dissertation proposal!