Dr. Yuru Lin
Associate Professor
School of Computing and Information

Abstract:
Attention is a scarce resource in this information-rich world. Measuring and predicting the quantity of attention is crucially relevant to online content hosting, commerce, news media, political movements, public attitudes, and collective decision making. In this talk, I will present our recent works that link online attention and communication patterns to real-world actions. Using large-scale, longitudinal communication traces collected from Twitter and Youtube, we quantitatively characterize and compare the online activities and attention by online users holding distinct views, and link the attention dynamics to societal trends and events related to social issues including gun violence, abortion, anti-racism, and immigration. Our studies help answer several important questions toward transforming society, such as how protests connect to the changes in online prejudice, how opposing political views have been marketed across different social media, and how crises may bring opportunity for reconciling conflicts.

Friday, November 13, 2020
12:00 -1:00 PM
(Questions/Conversation 1:00 – 1:30)

RSVP for Zoom meeting information: 

https://pitt.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9N37SCshQtYnThj