This talk will focus on an ongoing interdisciplinary research project that utilizes social scientific and computational methods to study the relationship between algorithmic personalization and online radicalization. Our overall objectives for this project are, first, to identify the technological, personal, relational, and cultural factors that contribute to radicalization of vulnerable populations on social media and, second, to develop tools that can identify and predict radicalization on social media.

Bio:

The interplay between discrete and continuous optimization has been an exciting theme in recent years. This talk will focus on submodular function maximization as a case study to demonstrate the power of this interplay. Some of the main results in this space have been obtained almost a decade ago. Recently there has been a new direction of interest, namely to find parallel and low-adaptivity algorithms. The talk will describe some of these recent developments. No prior background on submodular functions will be assumed.

Software engineers have long been denied the label of “professional.” As a matter of law, this designation carries more than a vanity status; it bestows a special presumption of judicial deference to the professional’s judgment against complaints of malpractice. This issue has returned to the fore because the software industry has renewed its efforts to secure recognition as a “profession,” even as it has come under increasing scrutiny for the real-world harms it perpetuates.