Dr Ioannis Katakis visited Technion at the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management at the 25th of March 2018. Dr Katakis delivered a talk titled “Data Science as an Interdisciplinary Tool: the Impact on Social Sciences”. After the talk there were a lot of discussions regarding future collaborations. We would like to thank the people in Technion and especially Prof Avigdor Gal, for the excellent hospitality.
The abstract of the talk is the following:
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.