computer science guest speaker series: computational social semantics for mining actionable insights

the department of computer science graduate seminar 2022
guest speaker series presented by:

dr. ebrahim bagheri
"computational social semantics for mining actionable insights"

friday, october 21st, 2022
11:30 am

abstract:
the influence of social media platforms on many aspects of our personal and societal lives has given rise to a host of computational methods that analyze social data. in this talk, i will motivate the need for computational semantics, i.e., automated sense making of social user generated content, in order to enable a deeper analysis of social content. i will present my group's approach to grounding social content in semantics despite their challenging characteristics including being antigrammatical, noisy and lacking in context. i will then show how capturing the semantics of social content can lead to a range of methods for micro (user level) and macro (community-level) analysis of social media content, as well as allowing for performing natural experiments through observational studies. i will provide impactful applications of our work in the healthcare domain such as maternal mental health and knowledge synthesis in the medical literature.


dr. ebrahim bagheri is a professor in the department of electrical, computer and biomedical engineering at toronto metropolitan university. he holds a canada research chair in social information retrieval as well as an nserc industrial research chair in social media analytics. he works on computational models for the semantic analysis of highly unstructured textual content in order to interpret the meaning behind surface-level human communication, leading to highly efficient information processing and management tools and techniques. he currently serves as an associate editor for acm transactions on intelligent systems and technology and ieee transactions on network science and engineering.


to register for this virtual event, please email grad.compsci@lakeheadu.ca and a zoom link will be shared.

everyone is welcome.