Author: William Kennedy

The Colloquium on Computational Social Science/Data Sciences Research speaker for Friday, March 08, 2019, will be Cody Buntain, Post Doctoral Researcher with New York University’s Social Media and Political Participation Lab. Dr. Buntain’s talk entitled “#pray4victims: Consistencies In Response to and Automatically Identifying Diverse Information Needs During Disasters on Twitter” is scheduled to begin at 3:00 in the Center for Social Complexity Suite located on the 3rd floor of Research Hall. The talk will be followed by a Q&A session along with light refreshments.

This session will be live-streamed on the YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7YCR-pBTZ_9865orDNVHNA

For announcements regarding this and future streams, please join the CSS/CDS student and alumni Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/257383120973297/

For a list of upcoming and previous seminars, please visit: https://cos.gmu.edu/cds/calendar/

Abstract: This talk presents commonalities in response across disasters in online social networks (OSNs) and Twitter specifically.

After presenting an algorithm for extracting vocabularies across disasters, we extract type-specific vocabularies for terrorist attacks, earthquakes, and climate-related disasters between 2012 and 2017.

Within similar disasters, commonalities emerge: terrorism responses reference the “attack” and law enforcement, earthquake responses mention the quake and its magnitude, and climate-related responses include safety and requests for aid.

Across disaster types, tweets regularly mention victims/affected and prayer, consistent with communal coping and social support in crisis aftermath.

Using these disaster-type vocabularies, we study Twitter as an alternate measure for severity, correlating casualties to Twitter volume.

These vocabularies better correlate with casualties than baseline crisis lexica, especially in western countries.

Twitter response and casualties diverge at the extreme, and Twitter response is stronger in Western countries, suggesting perceived severity is driven by additional factors.

These vocabularies also potentially represent disaster-type-specific information needs, which we then roll into a machine learning task for automatically identifying crisis-related information in Twitter data.

Bio: Cody Buntain received his PhD from the Computer Science Department at the University of Maryland and is a postdoctoral researcher with New York University’s Social Media and Political Participation Lab. His primary research areas apply large-scale computational methods to social media and other online content, specifically studying how individuals engage socially and politically and respond to crises and disaster in online spaces. Current problems he is studying include cross-platform information flows, network structures, temporal evolution/politicization of topics, misinformation, polarization, and information quality. Recent publications include papers on influencing credibility assessment in social media, consistencies in social media’s response to crises, the disability community’s use of social networks for political participation, and characterizing gender and direction in online harassment.

• *The programs and services offered by George Mason University are open to all who seek them. George Mason does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, ethnic national origin (including shared ancestry and/or ethnic characteristics), sex, disability, military status (including veteran status), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, pregnancy status, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by law. After an initial review of its policies and practices, the university affirms its commitment to meet all federal mandates as articulated in federal law, as well as recent executive orders and federal agency directives.

will present at the Colloquium in Computational Social Science and Computational and Data Sciences Research. Dr. Yu’s talk entitled “Synthesizing Human-centric Architectural Layouts via Affordance Analysis and Crowd Simulations” (abstract below) is scheduled to begin at 2:00 (PLEASE NOTE EARLY START TIME FOR THIS TALK ONLY) in the Center for Social Complexity Suite located on the 3rd floor of Research Hall. The talk will be followed by a Q&A session along with light refreshments.

This session will be live-streamed on the YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7YCR-pBTZ_9865orDNVHNA

For announcements regarding this and future streams, please join the CSS/CDS student and alumni Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/257383120973297/

For a list of upcoming and previous seminars, please visit: https://cos.gmu.edu/cds/calendar/

Abstract: In this talk, I will discuss the recent progress of my team in devising computational design approaches for automatically generating human-centered architectural layouts for real-world design and virtual reality applications. For example, I will talk about the state-of-the-art procedural modeling techniques for generating large-scale architectural layouts that are optimized with respect to human navigation properties; and techniques for automatically generating interior designs for furnishing indoor scenes with furniture objects. In particular, I will discuss how human intentions and functionality considerations can be employed as the key criteria in generating 3D worlds. I will also discuss how human perceptual data tracked from virtual reality can be employed for creating personalized workspace design and for VR training.

Bio: Craig Yu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Volgenau School of Engineering. He works on computer graphics, vision, human-computer interaction, and virtual reality, particularly on AI and data-driven techniques for computational design. Yu obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA in 2013 with an Outstanding Recognition in Research Award. Yu was a visiting scientist at the MIT International Design Center and a visiting scholar at the Stanford Computer Graphics Lab. He is the recipient of the Cisco Outstanding Graduate Research Award, the Award of Excellence from Microsoft Research, the UCLA Dissertation Year Fellowship, and the Sir Edward Youde Memorial Fellowship. His research has been featured by New Scientist, the UCLA Newsletter, and the IEEE Xplore Innovation Spotlight. His lab is supported by the NSF, Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, and Oracle.

• *The programs and services offered by George Mason University are open to all who seek them. George Mason does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, ethnic national origin (including shared ancestry and/or ethnic characteristics), sex, disability, military status (including veteran status), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, pregnancy status, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by law. After an initial review of its policies and practices, the university affirms its commitment to meet all federal mandates as articulated in federal law, as well as recent executive orders and federal agency directives.

of InfoLogix, Inc., will speak at the Computational Social Science Research Colloquium /Colloquium in Computational and Data Sciences, Friday, February 22. Dr. Samuelson’s talk entitled “Garbage Cans, Lymph Nodes and Cybersecurity: Modeling Organizational Effectiveness” (abstract below) will begin at 3:00 in the Center for Social Complexity Suite located on the 3rd floor of Research Hall. The talk will be followed by a Q&A session along with light refreshments.

This session will be live-streamed on the YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7YCR-pBTZ_9865orDNVHNA

For announcements regarding this and future streams, please join the CSS/CDS student and alumni Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/257383120973297/

For a list of upcoming and previous seminars, please visit: https://cos.gmu.edu/cds/calendar/

Abstract: We re-examine and extend the well-known “Garbage Can Model” of Cohen, March and Olsen (1972). They postulated that organizational choice can be well represented by a garbage can into which problems and solutions are thrown randomly. When, by random mixing, a solution meets a problem, the problem is solved and removed from the venue. In 2006, Folcik and Orosz presented an agent-based model of a lymph node, into which blood cells bring foreign substances and objects that are then neutralized by specialized immune system cells. This model led several social scientists, notably Troitzsch (2008), to point out a strong resemblance to the garbage can model, but now adding the recognition that problems require skill sets which some, but not all, solvers possess. Matching skill sets is critical to effective performance, and providing the right mix of solver skill sets enables the organization to perform effectively and economically. We suggest ways to apply this approach to integrated man-machine systems intended to enhance information systems security. One implication is that some approaches currently popular with policy-makers are highly unlikely to work.

• *The programs and services offered by George Mason University are open to all who seek them. George Mason does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, ethnic national origin (including shared ancestry and/or ethnic characteristics), sex, disability, military status (including veteran status), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, pregnancy status, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by law. After an initial review of its policies and practices, the university affirms its commitment to meet all federal mandates as articulated in federal law, as well as recent executive orders and federal agency directives.

The Computational Social Science Research Colloquium /Colloquium in Computational and Data Sciences speaker for Friday, February 15, 2019, will be Robert Axtell, Professor, Computational Social Science Program, Department of Computational and Data Sciences, College of Science/Department of Economics, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, George Mason University. Dr. Axtell’s talk entitled “Lifetime/Survival/Reliability/Duration Analysis for Computational Models” will begin at 3:00 in the Center for Social Complexity Suite located on the 3rd floor of Research Hall. The talk will be followed by a Q&A session along with light refreshments.

This session will be live-streamed on the YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7YCR-pBTZ_9865orDNVHNA

For announcements regarding this and future streams, please join the CSS/CDS student and alumni Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/257383120973297/

For a list of upcoming and previous seminars, please visit: https://cos.gmu.edu/cds/calendar/

Abstract: In a variety of computational models, structures arise, evolve, then disappear, perhaps replaced by other, comparable structures. For example, in some economic models firms form from the interactions of agents, operate for some period of time, and then exit. In housing models, households hold mortgages for finite periods of time before replacing them either due to refinancing or moving to a new house. In political (marketing) models the interests of parties (businesses) are aligned with certain segments of voters (consumers) for a period of time, until competition leads to realignment (brand switching). In environmental policy models specific polluting technologies have finite lifetimes and are eventually replaced by cleaner technologies. In disease models people are infected for varying lengths of time based on their health status, policies, etc. Traffic jams and conflicts have finite duration.

In this talk I will review the mathematical and statistical formalisms of lifetime analysis, also known as survival analysis in biostatistics and reliability analysis in engineering, focusing on the concepts most useful for computational models. Specifically while the former field has concerned itself with censored data (e.g., short clinical trials during which not all patient health outcomes can be observed), and the latter has focused on schemes to manage unreliable equipment, in computational modeling we often need to better understand both age and lifetime distributions of objects in our models, typically have large amounts of quasi-exhaustive ‘data,’ normally know some covariates, and usually work in discrete time.

• *The programs and services offered by George Mason University are open to all who seek them. George Mason does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, ethnic national origin (including shared ancestry and/or ethnic characteristics), sex, disability, military status (including veteran status), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, pregnancy status, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by law. After an initial review of its policies and practices, the university affirms its commitment to meet all federal mandates as articulated in federal law, as well as recent executive orders and federal agency directives.

The Computational Social Science Research Colloquium /Colloquium in Computational and Data Sciences speaker for Friday, February 08, 2019, will be John Schuler, Ph.D. student in the Department of Economics, George Mason University. John’s talk entitled “Nonparametric Estimation of General Equilibrium Price Vectors” will begin at 3:00 in the Center for Social Complexity Suite located on the 3rd floor of Research Hall. The talk will be followed by a Q&A session along with light refreshments.

This session will be live-streamed on the YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7YCR-pBTZ_9865orDNVHNA

For announcements regarding this and future streams, please join the CSS/CDS student and alumni Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/257383120973297/

For a list of upcoming and previous seminars, please visit: https://cos.gmu.edu/cds/calendar/

Abstract: Agent-based economic modeling often requires the determination of an initial equilibrium price vector. Calculating this directly requires algorithms of exponential computational complexity. It is known that a partial equilibrium price can be estimated using a median of trades. This paper explores the possibility of a multivariate generalization of this technique using depth functions as well as alternative methods.

• *The programs and services offered by George Mason University are open to all who seek them. George Mason does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, ethnic national origin (including shared ancestry and/or ethnic characteristics), sex, disability, military status (including veteran status), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, pregnancy status, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by law. After an initial review of its policies and practices, the university affirms its commitment to meet all federal mandates as articulated in federal law, as well as recent executive orders and federal agency directives.

at the Computational Social Science Research Colloquium in Computational and Data Sciences on Friday, February 1, 2019. Dr. Waters is with the Schar School of Public Policy at George Mason University. His talk, entitled “Firm Formation and the Regional Allocation of Labor” (abstract below), will begin at 3:00 in the Center for Social Complexity Suite located on the 3rd floor of Research Hall. The talk will be followed by a Q&A session along with light refreshments.

This session will be live-streamed on the YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7YCR-pBTZ_9865orDNVHNA

For announcements regarding this and future streams, please join the CSS/CDS student and alumni Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/257383120973297/

For a list of upcoming and previous seminars, please visit: https://cos.gmu.edu/cds/calendar/

Abstract: The distribution of city-sizes within countries tends to follow a Pareto distribution that satisfies Zipf’s law. Geographically, larger cities tend to be located more distant from one another than smaller cities. Working towards an explanation of these empirical observations, a geographic extension of Axtell’s agent-based model of endogenous firm formation is presented. The model introduces three components into the underlying model: migration costs, an urban productivity premium, and an urban congestion cost.

• *The programs and services offered by George Mason University are open to all who seek them. George Mason does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, ethnic national origin (including shared ancestry and/or ethnic characteristics), sex, disability, military status (including veteran status), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, pregnancy status, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by law. After an initial review of its policies and practices, the university affirms its commitment to meet all federal mandates as articulated in federal law, as well as recent executive orders and federal agency directives.

The Computational Social Science Research Colloquium /Colloquium in Computational and Data Sciences speaker for Friday, January 25, 2019, will be Annetta Burger. Annetta Burger’s talk entitled “Operationalizing Resiliency in Complex Adaptive Systems: an Agent-Based Model of a NWMD Detonation” (abstract below) will begin at 3:00 in the Center for Social Complexity Suite located on the 3rd floor of Research Hall. The talk will be followed by a Q&A session along with light refreshments.

This session will be live-streamed on the YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7YCR-pBTZ_9865orDNVHNA
For announcements regarding this and future streams, please join the CSS/CDS student and alumni Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/257383120973297/
For a list of upcoming and previous seminars, please visit: https://cos.gmu.edu/cds/calendar/

Abstract: Increasingly, Agent-Based Models (ABMs) are being used to study human behavior in complex adaptive systems. In the process of simulating these systems modelers are faced with a myriad of design decisions regarding the representation of actors and processes necessary for real-world validity. Modelers must make assumptions, reduce a multitude of heterogenous variables and interacting processes into a limited set for simulation and analysis, and fit them into computational frameworks; balancing tradeoffs between simplicity, model accuracy, and computational tractability. Ultimately, the simulation product must provide accurate measures for verification and validation and sufficient transparency for model analysis and understandability to demonstrate the accuracy of the system representation and its predictive power. An ABM of the detonation of a Nuclear Weapon of Mass Destructions provides a case example of how to operationalize human behavior in an ABM for simulation and experimentation.

• *The programs and services offered by George Mason University are open to all who seek them. George Mason does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, ethnic national origin (including shared ancestry and/or ethnic characteristics), sex, disability, military status (including veteran status), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, pregnancy status, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by law. After an initial review of its policies and practices, the university affirms its commitment to meet all federal mandates as articulated in federal law, as well as recent executive orders and federal agency directives.

at the Computational Social Science Research Colloquium /Colloquium in Computational and Data Sciences speaker on Friday, December 07, 2018. Dr. Crooks, Associate Professor, Department of Computational and Data Sciences, will speak on “Computational Modeling of Slums: Progress and Challenges.” The presentation will begin at 3:00 in the Center for Social Complexity Suite located on the 3rd floor of Research Hall and will be followed by a Q&A session along with light refreshments.

This session will be live-streamed on the YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7YCR-pBTZ_9865orDNVHNA

For announcements regarding this and future streams, please join the CSS/CDS student and alumni Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/257383120973297/

For a list of upcoming and previous seminars, please visit: https://cos.gmu.edu/cds/calendar/

We hope to see you on Friday, December 7th at 3 p.m.

Abstract: Over the last 50 years the world has increasingly become more urbanized. Much of this growth has occurred in less developed countries, which often lack the resources to accommodate such growth. This has led to the growth of slums, estimated to be home for other 1 billion people. The UN-Habitat projects slum population to double by 2030, which would make them home for 2 in 5 people living in cities. In this talk I will introduce slums, discuss their growth, and provide an overview on what progress has been made to studying and modeling them. This will lead to a discussion of a series of key challenges that need to be addressed if we are to tackle slums from a computational perspective.

• *The programs and services offered by George Mason University are open to all who seek them. George Mason does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, ethnic national origin (including shared ancestry and/or ethnic characteristics), sex, disability, military status (including veteran status), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, pregnancy status, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by law. After an initial review of its policies and practices, the university affirms its commitment to meet all federal mandates as articulated in federal law, as well as recent executive orders and federal agency directives.

will be speaker at the Computational Social Science Research Colloquium /Colloquium in Computational and Data Sciences Friday, November 30, 2018. Sanjay’s talk entitled “Interlocking Directorates Analysis: Evidence from India BSE-100″ will begin at 3:00 in the Center for Social Complexity Suite located on the 3rd floor of Research Hall. The talk will be followed by a Q&A session along with light refreshments.

This session will be live-streamed on the YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7YCR-pBTZ_9865orDNVHNA

For announcements regarding this and future streams, please join the CSS/CDS student and alumni Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/257383120973297/

For a list of upcoming and previous seminars, please visit: https://cos.gmu.edu/cds/calendar/

We hope to see you on Friday, November 30, 2018 at 3PM.

Abstract:

Interlocked directorates among companies are common across the world and have been studied quite extensively in the Western World. This study focuses on interlocking directorates, also referred to as inter-organizational elite cooptation (Allen, 1974), among the top 100 publicly traded companies on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE-100) in India. The time period analyzed is between 2006 and 2010, the years spanning the recent great recession. While De (2012) looked at the performance effects of interlocking directorates within Indian business groups irrespective of their membership in BSE-100, it did not address in the analysis the key players, cliques, etc., the evolution of the interlocking over time, or any comparisons with the United States. This broad exploratory study is the first to look at the BSE-100 interlocking directorates’ network to see how it has or has not been dominated by a select group of individuals, companies or sectors during 2006-2010, along with the companies’ performances in the longer-term, given their position in the network. Some comparisons are also made with the US market using information available in published papers (Everard, 2002). This study also serves a secondary purpose of being an introduction to the interconnections between some of the biggest players in the Indian Economy/Stock Market and thus would also be of interest to those studying business in India.

• *The programs and services offered by George Mason University are open to all who seek them. George Mason does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, ethnic national origin (including shared ancestry and/or ethnic characteristics), sex, disability, military status (including veteran status), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, pregnancy status, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by law. After an initial review of its policies and practices, the university affirms its commitment to meet all federal mandates as articulated in federal law, as well as recent executive orders and federal agency directives.

will speak at the Computational Social Science Research Colloquium /Colloquium in Computational and Data Sciences speaker on Friday, November 2. Mr. Williams, Founder and CEO, Euclidian Trust. will speak on “Improved Entity Resolution as a Foundation for Model Precision” (abstract below). The session will begin at 3:00 in the Center for Social Complexity Suite located on the 3rd floor of Research Hall and will be followed by a Q&A session along with light refreshments.

This session will be live-streamed on the YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7YCR-pBTZ_9865orDNVHNA

For announcements regarding this and future streams, please join the CSS/CDS student and alumni Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/257383120973297/

For a list of upcoming and previous seminars, please visit: https://cos.gmu.edu/cds/calendar/

Abstract: Analyzing behavior, identifying and classifying micro-differentiations, and predicting outcomes relies on the establishment of a core foundation of reliable and complete data linking. Whether data about individuals, families, companies, or markets, acquiring data from orthogonal sources results in significant matching challenges. These matching challenges are difficult because attempts to eliminate (or minimize) false positives yields an increase in false negatives. The converse is true also.

This discussion will focus on the business challenges in matching data and the primary and compounded impact on subsequent outcome analysis. Through practical experience, the speaker led the development and first commercialization of novel approach to “referential matching”. This approach leads to a more comprehensive unit data model (patient, customer, company, etc.), which enables greater computational resolution and model accuracy by hyper-accurate linking, disambiguation, and detection of obfuscation. The discussion also covers the impact of enumeration strategies, data obfuscation/hashing, and natural changes in unit data models over time.

• *The programs and services offered by George Mason University are open to all who seek them. George Mason does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, ethnic national origin (including shared ancestry and/or ethnic characteristics), sex, disability, military status (including veteran status), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, pregnancy status, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by law. After an initial review of its policies and practices, the university affirms its commitment to meet all federal mandates as articulated in federal law, as well as recent executive orders and federal agency directives.