Rutgers NetSCI Lab Speaker Series
2021-2022
Register here for Cindy Shen’s talk on 9/17/21!
Combating Visual Misinformation in Online Networks | Cuihua (Cindy) Shen
9/17/2021, 12pm– 1pm EST
Cuihua (Cindy) Shen (PhD, University of Southern California), is a Professor of Communication and East Asian Studies at the University of California, Davis. Dr. Shen’s research and teaching interests revolve around the structure and impact of social networks in various online platforms. These sites include social networking apps (such as Facebook and WeChat), Massively Multiplayer Online Games (such as EverQuest II, World of Tanks, Eve Online), and other online communities designed for collaborative peer production, social support and political discussion. More recently, she has also taken an interest in the reaction to and diffusion of online misinformation and how we could correct it, especially misinformation in multimedia format.
On Data-Intensive Work | Joshua Barbour
10/15/2021, 12pm– 1pm EST
Joshua Barbour (PhD, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is an associate professor of Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a faculty affiliate of the Center for Health Communication, a collaboration between the Moody College of Communication and Dell Medical School. He founded the Automation Policy and Research Organizing Network (APRON) and directs the APRON Lab. Dr. Barbour studies how organizations design and discipline communication to solve problems. His research focuses on how macromorphic, societal structures complicatecommunication, organizing, and how people manage information and make meaning. His current research focuses on understanding the communicative difficulties of data-intensive work.
Complex Systems and Health Disparities | Michelle Birkett
2/3/2022, 12pm – 1pm EST
Introduction to Network Canvas Workshop | Michelle Birkett
2/4/2022, 10am – 12pm EST
Michelle Birkett (PhD, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) is an assistant professor in the Department of Medical Social Sciences at Northwestern University. She also directs the CONNECT Complex Systems and Health Disparities Research Program within the Institute for Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing. Dr. Birkett’s research uses network and quantitative methodologies to understand the social contextual influence of stigma on the health and wellbeing of marginalized populations, and in particular, sexual and gender minority youth. This work is influenced by a multilevel perspective of health that considers direct and indirect influences of multiple levels of the social and physical environment. This multilevel approach to understanding health underlies her interest in network data and her commitment to conducting research that leads to social change at multiple levels of society to eliminate health disparities.
Behavioral Effects of Exposure to Political Content in Social Media | Sandra González-Bailón
3/11/2022, 12pm-1pm EST
Sandra González-Bailón (PhD, University of Oxford) is an Associate Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and an affiliated faculty at the Warren Center for Network and Data Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research lies at the intersection of network science, data mining, computational tools, and political communication. Her applied research looks at how online networks shape exposure to information, with implications for how we think about political engagement, mobilization dynamics, information diffusion, and news consumption. She is the author of the book Decoding the Social World (MIT Press, 2017) and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Networked Communication (OUP, 2020). She serves as Associate Editor for the journals Social Networks, EPJ Data Science, and The International Journal of Press/Politics, and she is a member of the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science. She leads the research group DiMeNet (/daɪmnet/) — acronym for Digital Media, Networks, and Political Communication.