News

DataLab faculty and students will be at the International Networks for Social Network Analysis (INSNA) Sunbelt Conference this week.

Research by DataLab co-Director Dr. Blumenstock was discussed in an article in today's New York Times, "Satellite Images Can Pinpoint Poverty Where Surveys Can’t."

Dr. Blumenstock will be presenting his research on behavioral constraints to saving at the Pacific Development Conference at Stanford University.

Ian Wesley-Smith and Jevin West gave a talk at the WSDM conference on one of the winning algorithms for the Data Challenge.

On Wed. January 27th, Dr. Spiro will speak about her research exploring rumoring behavior on social media during crisis events at the UW Undergraduate Research Seminar: Research Exposed! Approaches to Inquiry.

Dr. Spiro's article "Research opportunities at the intersection of social media and survey data" is being published in the upcoming special issue of Current Opinion in Psychology on Social media and applications to health behavior.

Jevin West and his work on open access metrics were featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Joshua Blumenstock's post on Mobile-izing Savings in Afghanistan was voted the "Most influential post of 2015" by NextBillion, a prominent research portal focused on the world's 4 billion low-income producers and consumers.

DataLab faculty and students had a number of paper accepted to the 2016 ACM CHI conference. Yea Seul Kim and Dr. Hullman's paper 'Generating Personalized Spatial Analogies for Distances and Areas', with collaborator Maneesh Agrawala was accepted. Dr. Hullman's work 'Approximately When is my Bus? User-centered Visualizations of Uncertainty in Everyday, Mobile Predictive Systems' with collaborators Matt Kay, Tara Kola, and Sean Munson, was also accepted to the conference. Finally, Dr. Spiro's research article 'Could this be true? I think so! Expressed Uncertainty in Online Rumoring' co-authored Dr. Kate Starbird (HCDE), and students I. Edwards, K. Zhou, J. Maddock, and S. Narasimhan was accepted.

Dr. Emma Spiro and Dr. Kate Starbird (HCDE) along with student collaborators C. Andrews, E. Fichet, and S. Ding were awarded a honorable mention for their 2016 CSCW paper "Keeping Up with the Tweet-dashians: The Impact of 'Official' Accounts on Online Rumoring." The award is given to the top 5% of CSCW papers each year.

Dr. Blumenstock's research was featured on KPLU this morning. It was also recently covered by the New York Times, the BBC, GeekWire, Cristian Science Monitor, and media outlets in Spain and Germany.

Dr. Spiro and collaborators have a new research article, "A cross-hazard analysis of terse message retransmission on Twitter", published in the Proceedings of the National Academcy of Sciences.

Dr. Blumenstock's paper, Predicting Poverty and Wealth from Mobile Phone Data, is being published in the November 27 issue of Science Magazine!

Dr. Blumenstock was awarded a Millenium Grand Challenge Exploration grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Yea Seul Kim and Dr. Hullman's work on text simplification for science journalism was featured on the European Journalism Center's website Data Driven Journalism