Research

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I am a PhD candidate at the Complex Networks / Data Mining Group at UCLA, working with Professor Vwani Roychowdhury. My research interests lie in areas related to data mining and applied mathematics, more specifically social computing, complex networks, and computational social science. I’m most intrigued by news content and the way it is created and spread on the web and my research projects have mainly involved information diffusion and clustering on networks.

I am currently working on two projects. One is on dynamics of user engagement on a dataset from a social news site with story submission and voting systems. My other project is on narrative detection in online forums. These projects involve community detection algorithms, and some natural language processing tools.

My latest paper titled “Blind Men and the Elephant: Detecting Evolving Groups In Social News” will be presented at ICWSM2013 in Boston, and it is available on arxive here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.1567.

My previous project during an internship in the summer of 2011 at HP Labs Social Computing Group was on the prediction of news story popularity on Twitter. It was recently featured in The Atlantic (twice!), Mashable, MIT’s Technology Review, and a few other websites. I presented it at ICWSM in one of my favorite countries, the beautiful Ireland. Here is a link to the paper: BANDARI, R.; ASUR, S.; HUBERMAN, B.. The Pulse of News in Social Media: Forecasting Popularity. International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, North America, may. 2012. Prior to that paper, I was involved in a project on the diffusion of event-specific information on Twitter.

Two years ago I initiated a reading group on Social Computing with the help of Chien-Ju Ho at UCLA. I also mentored two undergraduate students, Ansuya and Allen, who wrote and presented their work in a paper titled: “An Automated Multiscale Map of Conversations: Mothers and Matters,” at Socinfo 2012. In Summer of 2012 I was the academic mentor to a group of bright undergraduate interns at the RIPS program at the Institute for Pure and Apllied Mathematics, working on cross-language information retrieval on the dataset of USC’s Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education. This summer I will again be working as an academic mentor to a team of IPAM-RIPS 2013 students working on a Google project.

Awards

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National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, 2005-2008

Henry Samueli Excellence in Teaching award, 2012

A watercolor I did a few years ago when I visited the Topkapi...

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:32:00 -0500

A watercolor I did a few years ago when I visited the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul.

Roja Bandari

Research

Awards

A watercolor I did a few years ago when I visited the Topkapi...