Peaks Krafft will join the faculty of the Oxford Internet Institute, the Social Sciences Division, of the University of Oxford this June. Read more in its blog post, New Research Fellow Joins the Oxford Internet Institute. Congratulations, Dr. Krafft!

PhD student Li Zeng presented her work "'Friending' in Online Fitness Communities: Exploring Activity-Based Online Network Structure" at the 52nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS).

PhD student Li Zeng is scheduled to give an invited research talk "Understanding Social Behavior Using Digital Traces" at Peking University this week.

Dr. Krafft will participate in the (competitively selected) Berkman Assembly program, a program that gathers technologists, managers, and policymakers to confront emerging problems related to the ethics and governance of artificial intelligence.

The DataLab's Critical Platform Studies Group will present their work "Algorithmic Accountability in Surveillance Regulation" at the 2019 iConference.

The DataLab's Critical Platform Studies Group will present their work "Understanding vs. Accounting for Automated Systems: The Case of the Seattle Surveillance Ordinance" at TILTing 2019: 'Regulating a World in Transition'.

PhD student Leo Stewart presented "Drawing the Lines of Contention: Networked Frame Contests within #BlackLivesMatter Discourse" at the 21st ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.

Dr. Krafft and co-authors presented their work "How to Organize your Deep Reinforcement Learning Agents: The Importance of Communication Topology" at the 2018 NeurIPS Deep Reinforcement Learning Workshop

PhD student Li Zeng won the Best Paper Award of the 10th International Conference on Social Computing and Social Media for her paper “Stay Connected and Keep Motivated: Modeling Activity Level of Exercise in an Online Fitness Community”.

Dr. Spiro gave a keynote at the 2018 Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining (ASONAM) conference in Barcelona, Spain.

Dr. Spiro will attend the International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2). At the conference she will present a poster on joint work with PhD student Li Zeng on “Gender Differences in Social Exercise in an Online Fitness Community”.

PhD student Li Zeng will present her work at the 2018 HCI International conference in Las Vegas this week. Her research paper, “Stay Connected and Keep Motivated: Modeling Activity Level of Exercise in an Online Fitness Community” explores personal health and wellness tracking.

Dr. Spiro and Dr. Starbird were awarded an NSF grant to study Collective Sensemaking Online. The research project will address empirical and conceptual questions about online rumoring, asking: (1) How do online rumors permute, branch, and otherwise evolve over the course of their lifetime? (2) How can theories of rumor spread in offline settings be extended to online interaction, and what factors (technological and behavioral) influence these dynamics, perhaps making online settings distinct environments for information flow?

Dr. Spiro was invited to attend the Current Challenges in Computing Conference on Computational Social Science last week. The conference, held in Napa, CA brings together experts to spur discussion about how to advance the state of the art by exploiting current and anticipated computing capability.

DataLab faculty and students attended the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems this past week. CHI, the premier international conference of Human-Computer Interaction, was held in Denver, CO. DataLab faculty and students presented a variety of work, including a Best Paper by PhD student Yeaseul Kim and Dr. Hullman!

• Kim, Reinecke, and Hullman. Explaining the Gap: Visualizing One’s Predictions Improves Recall and Comprehension of Data. Best Paper Award.
• Kim, Wongsuphasawat, Hullman, and Heer. Graphscape: A Model for Automated Reasoning About Visualization Similarity and Sequencing. Honorable Mention Paper.
• Adar, E., Gearig, C., Balusubramanian, A., and Hullman, J. Persalog: Personalization of News Article Content. 
• Wongsuphasawat, Qu, Moritz, Chang, Ouk,  Anand, Mackinlay, Howe, and Heer. Voyager 2: Augmenting Visual Analysis with Partial View Specifications.
• Krafft, Zhou, Edwards, Starbird, and Spiro. Centralized, Parallel, and Distributed Information Processing during Collective Sensemaking.