Upcoming HCIL Talk: Michelle Zhou – IBM Research

Computational Discovery of Personal Traits from Social Media to Deliver Individualized Experience

Michelle Zhou
IBM Research – Almaden

HCIL Lab Room 2105 – Hornbake South
Tuesday January 29th at 11:00am

Abstract:
In this talk, I will give an overview of my team’s work on two aspects: people modeling and people engagement. People modeling is to develop both empirical and computational methodology and technology that automatically derive an individual’s or a group’s unique traits, including psychological, social, and affective characteristics, from people’s social media behavior (e.g., content of social media posts and social networking activities). People engagement is to use such derived traits to devise more individualized people interaction mechanisms (e.g., targeted campaigns for consumers and individualized interventions for patients). While my talk will mainly focus on the people modeling methodology and various modeling techniques that we have developed, I will use concrete applications, ranging from precision marketing to crowd-powered information solicitation on social media, to discuss interesting research issues in people engagement based on the results of people modeling.

Bio:
Dr. Michelle Zhou is a Senior Research Manager at IBM Research – Almaden, where she manages the User Systems and Experience Research (USER) group. Prior to her current post, she was a Senior Research Manager at IBM Research, China, managing the Intelligent User Interaction and Social Collaboration group, and a Research Manager of the Intelligent Multimedia Interaction group at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. Zhou received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Columbia University. Her expertise is in the interdisciplinary areas of intelligent user interaction, information visualization and smart visual analytics, and analytics-driven social computing and crowdsourcing. She has published over 70 peer-reviewed, refereed articles and filed over twenty patents in above areas. Zhou is active in several research communities, including Intelligent User Interfaces, Information Visualization and Visual Analytics, and Multimedia. She has co-organized/co-chaired conferences and workshops, and served on the technical program committees for key conferences in these areas. She was the general conference co-chair for ACM IUI 2007, and the technical program co-chair for ACM Multimedia 2009 and Intelligent User Interfaces 2010. Michelle currently serves on the editorial board of three journals, ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, Applications (TOMCCAP), ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST), and ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems. Zhou was named an ACM Distinguished Scientist in 2009.