Dr. Bei Yu, December 06, 2024
An NLP Analysis of Causal Language Use in Scientific Communication
Dr. Bei Yu is a Professor at the School of Information Studies, Syracuse University. Her research focuses on using machine learning and natural language processing techniques to assist scholarly communication and science communication, especially in monitoring and improving the quality of scientific information. This presentation discussed Project Precheck, which focuses on understanding press release exaggeration in scientific research. The project hopes to address the prevalence of drawing causal conclusions from observational studies, which has raised concerns among researchers and audiences that both scientific papers and news articles are making exaggerated claims.
Dr. Siqi Wu, January 31, 2025
Towards Transparent Social Computing Systems
Dr. Siqi Wu is an Assistant professor of Information and Library Science in the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University Bloomington. His research aims to (i) advance our understanding of contemporary social phenomena via large-scale measurements and (ii) design future social computing systems via policies and interventions driven by data. This talk presented two studies, which both focused on the ways that people can and do use social media. The first study was a large-scale measurement study, meant to identify the patterns of news consumption at different places all around the world. The second study was meant to deduce the actual usefulness of YouTube’s different functions for removing unwanted video recommendations.
Yuerong Hu, April 11, 2025
Goodreads might not be that good to read: Complexities of online book reviews
Dr. Yuerong Hu is an Assistant professor at the Department of Information and Library Science of the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, at Indiana University Bloomington. Her primary research areas are digital humanities and cultural analytics, digital libraries, and critical data studies. Specifically, she investigates critical and contextualized usage of digitized and born-digital cultural data, such as digitized books and online book reviews. This talk presented three empirical research projects on incentivized reviews, children’s book reviews, and online reviewing behavior to demonstrate the complexities and nuances of online book reviews.