The Institute of Computing and Cybersystems will present a Distinguished Lecture by Dr. Doina Caragea on Friday, October 29, 2021, at 3:00 p.m. Dr. Caragea is a professor and the Michelle Munson-Serban Simu Keystone Research Scholar in the Computer Science department at Kansas State University. Her talk is itiled, “Mining Social Media to Aid Disaster Response.”
Dr. Caragea has expertise in machine learning and data mining, with applications to data intensive problems in recommender systems, text analytics, security informatics, and bioinformatics. In recent years, she has focused on semi-supervised and domain adaptation algorithms, under the assumption that labeled data for a domain of interest is limited, if available at all.
Lecture Title: Mining Social Media to Aid Disaster Response
Lecture Abstract: Disaster-affected communities are increasingly becoming the source of big (crisis) data during and following major disasters. At the same time, big data have the potential to become an integral source of information for response organizations, as they can help enhance the situational awareness and facilitate faster response where it is most needed. Despite such benefits, the challenges presented by big data preclude organizations from using them routinely. Manually sifting through voluminous streaming data to filter useful information in real time is inherently impossible. We study machine learning solutions to help emergency response organizations deal with the overload of relevant information, and improve situational awareness and crisis response. Our proposed machine learning solutions have the potential to transform the way in which crisis response organizations operate and, in turn, to provide better support to the victims of disasters in a timely fashion.
Speaker Bio: Doina Caragea, Ph.D., is a Professor at Kansas State University. Her research and teaching interests are in the areas of machine learning and data science, with applications to crisis informatics, security informatics, and bioinformatics. Her projects build upon close collaborations with social scientists, security experts and life scientists, and aim to provide practical computational approaches to address real-world challenges. Dr. Caragea received her PhD in Computer Science from Iowa State University in August 2004, and was honored with the Iowa State University Research Excellence Award for her work. She has published more than 150 refereed conference and journal articles. She has a strong track record of extramural funding, with $12M+ total funding as PI, co-PI or senior personnel from NSF and industry.
Please note that this lecture was originally scheduled for October 22, 2021.