Keynotes & Judges

Katy Börner is the Victor H. Yngve Professor of Information Science in the Department of Information and Library Science, School of Informatics and Computing, Adjunct Professor at the Department of Statistics in the College of Arts and Sciences, Core Faculty of Cognitive Science, Research Affiliate of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research and Biocomplexity Institute, Member of the Advanced Visualization Laboratory, Leader of the Information Visualization Lab, and Founding Director of the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN. She holds a MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Technology in Leipzig, 1991 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Kaiserslautern, 1997.
Katy is a visiting Professor at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in The Netherlands and is a curator of the international Places & Spaces: Mapping Science exhibit. She became an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow in 2012. Katy's research focuses on the development of data analysis and visualization techniques for information access, understanding, and management. She is particularly interested in the study of the structure and evolution of scientific disciplines; the analysis and visualization of online activity; and the development of cyberinfrastructures for large scale scientific collaboration and computation.

David A. Ferrucci is a pioneer who established new frontiers in the study of unstructured text to levels that some thought impossible to achieve. A former IBM VP and Fellow, his team pioneered advances in natural language technologies and leveraged those technologies in a variety of computational, data analytic and knowledge management solutions. Under his leadership, the group developed Deep QA (“Watson”), the cognitive computing system that beat the best human Jeopardy! champions in 2011. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a BS in Biology from Manhattan College. Currently, a partner of the private hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund in the world, David works on applying natural language processing and artificial intelligence to develop socioeconomic theories.
David’s scholarship, leadership and success opened up a new field of research which moved beyond statistical correlations to integrating logic tools for improved understanding of human behavior. Not only does he continue to advance this research at Bridgewater today, but with IBM opening up Watson to developers via the cloud last year, a limitless number of computer scientists, sociologists and innovators will be able to trace their successes back to David, his team and his belief in forging a new trail. He has been named Innovator of the Year by R&D Magazine and Identified by Slate as among "The Most Innovative and Practical Thinkers of Our Time."

Sandra González-Bailón is an Assistant Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, and affiliated faculty at the Warren Center for Network and Data Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining Penn, she was a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute (2008-2013), where she is now a Research Associate. She completed her doctoral degree in Nuffield College (University of Oxford) and her undergraduate studies at the University of Barcelona.
Sandra’s research lies at the intersection of network science, data mining, computational tools, and political communication. She is currently working on the book Decoding the Social World. When Data Science meets Communication, forthcoming with MIT Press. More information about her research and publications can be found at her group’s website: http://dimenet.asc.upenn.edu/.

Michael W. Macy is Goldwin Smith Professor of Sociology, Professor of Information Science, and Director of the Social Dynamics Laboratory at Cornell.
With support from the National Science Foundation, his research team has used computational models, online laboratory experiments, and digital traces of device-mediated interaction to explore familiar but enigmatic social patterns such as diurnal mood changes, the emergence and collapse of fads, the spread of self-destructive behaviors, the critical mass in collective action, the polarization of opinion, segregation of neighborhoods, and assimilation of minority cultures. Recent research uses 509 million Twitter messages to track diurnal and seasonal mood changes in 54 countries, and complete UK call logs to measure the economic consequences of network structure. His research has been published in leading journals, including Science, PNAS, American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, and Annual Review of Sociology.

Moran Cerf is an Assistant Professor at the Kellogg School of Management and the Neuroscience Program at Northwestern University. Additionally, he holds a position at the Neurosurgery Department, where he works with patients undergoing brain-surgery to study behavior, emotion and decision making, by directly recording the activity of individual nerve cells using electrodes implanted in their brain. Dr. Cerf holds a Ph.D in neuroscience from Caltech, as well as an MA in Philosophy and a B.S. in Physics from Tel-Aviv University.
His research uses methods from neuroscience to understand the underlying mechanisms of our psychology. He works with patients undergoing brain-surgery to study behavior, emotion, decision making and dreams, by directly recording the activity of individual nerve cells using electrodes implanted in their brain. He has published works that address questions such as: "How are conscious percepts formed in our brain?", "How can we control our emotions?" and "Which brain mechanisms determine if we find content interesting and engaging?" Recently, his focus has been on the neural mechanisms that underlie decision-making, thereby offering a new perspective on predicting future choices and investigating how much free will we have in our decisions.

He holds multiple patents and his works have been published in wide-circulation journals such as Nature and Science, as well as Scientific American Mind and leading neuroscience journals. Dr. Cerf's work has been featured in numerous media and cultural outlets such as CNN, Wired, BBC, Bloomberg, NPR, Time, MSNBC, Slate.Com, Gizmodo, New Scientist and dozens of others. He received several awards and NIH grants for his research, including the Instructional Improvement Grant, and the prestigious president scholarship for excellent PhD, along with a number of private fundings.

Prior to his academic career, Dr. Cerf spent nearly a decade in industry, holding managerial and development positions in computers security (as a hacker at Check Point and Imperva), pharmaceutical (CTO, Pharmaco-Kinesis), telecom (product architect, TTI Telecom), Fashion (Vivvva), software development (Log-On Software), and innovations development (S.I.T).

Gueorgi Kossinets is a staff data scientist at Google where he conducts research and statistical analysis as part of the Civic Innovation team. Previously he has worked on designing experiments and modeling data to improve Google's local, social and ads products. He holds a PhD in sociology from Columbia University. Dr. Kossinets is a reviewer for Google Faculty Research Awards and has served on program committees for a number of interdisciplinary conferences such as CHI, KDD, WWW and ICWSM, as well as a reviewer for American Journal of Sociology, PNAS and other journals. His research has been published in AJS, Science, Social Networks, and presented at CHI, KDD and WWW.

Susan Parker is a Research Manager at the University of Chicago's Crime Lab. She is leading the Multi-City Multi-Methods Gun Market Study, and works with city agencies to provide technical data analysis assistance. Before coming to the Crime Lab, she was a budget analyst for Obama for America. She holds an MPP from the Harris School of Public Policy Studies and is currently completing her MS in Analytics, also at the University of Chicago.

Matt Gee is a Senior Researcher at the University of Chicago's Urban Center for Computation and Data and the Center for Data Science and Public Policy, a joint center between the Computation Institute and the Harris School of Public Policy. At the University of Chicago he has led efforts combining the social sciences with machine learning, big data, and large-scale computation to drive behavior change and implement adaptive policy interventions, with a focus on energy use, urban dynamics, and sustainable development. He is the co-founder of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Data Science for Social Good fellowship, which after only two years has paired 84 fellows with over 30 national, state, and local government organizations and NGOs to build data-driven solutions to social problems.
Matt is the lead scientist on various projects aimed at understanding energy markets and creating systems for continuous energy policy learning, such as the Environmental Defense Fund's Open Energy Data initiative, New York's Open Energy Efficiency Meter, the City of San Francisco's Sustainable Systems Framework, and the City of Chicago's Neighborhood Energy Challenge. He serves as an advisor to Code for America, DataKind, the Chicago School of Data, the Census' City Open Data Challenge and is a member of the World Bank's Partnership for Open Data. He has worked at US Treasury's Office of Energy and Environment and has founded several companies, including residential energy efficiency finance company Effortless Energy. He also co-founded the Chicago Policy Review Online, and the Harris Energy Association.

Lorien Jasny (Workshop: Social Network Analysis in R) is a computational social scientist focusing on questions of public involvement in environmental decision making. Her research agenda focuses on two related themes – how the structure and dynamics of inter-organizational networks affect policy change, and how the structure and dynamics of belief networks affect behavioral change. Substantively, she studies how people try to bring about societal change in response to political and environmental concerns. Methodologically, the need to grapple with these often complex phenomena requires the use and development of techniques for handling large, dynamic, and relational datasets.

Brian Lange (Workshop:  Natural Language Processing and Text Analysis in Python) is a Data Scientist at DataScope Analytics, where he leads design process exercises and designs analyses, web interfaces and visualizations. He has contributed to projects for P&G, Thomson Reuters, and other well known companies and his work has been featured on FlowingData. While he's not nerding out about typography and information density, he enjoys science and comedy podcasts, making beer, and listening to weird music.

Jackie Milhans (Workshop: Computational Research Fundamentals) is Lead Computational Specialist in NUIT Research Computing at Northwestern University. Her role involves consulting and training researchers at Northwestern in high-performance computing, programming, operating systems, and research data management. Her postdoctoral work at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, concentrated on examining the effects of friction on microstructural evolution in polycrystalline ductile metals in extreme environments. Her research background also includes multi-scale modeling of mechanical and thermal material properties, homogenization of multi-phase materials, inverse materials design, and statistical continuum mechanics. She received her Ph.D. In Materials Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, GA and her B.S. In Materials Science and Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA.

Dr. Stuart W. Shulman (Workshop: Text Analytics for Social Data Using DiscoverText & Sifter) is founder & CEO of Texifter, and a Research Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He was the founding Director of the Qualitative Data Analysis Program (QDAP) at the University of Pittsburgh and at UMass Amherst, and Associate Director of the National Center for Digital Government. Dr. Shulman is Editor Emeritus of the Journal of Information Technology & Politics, the official journal of Information Technology & Politics section of the American Political Science Association.