Kristina Lerman is a Principal Scientist at the Information Sciences Institute,a unit of the University of Southern California (USC) and a Research Professor in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering's Computer Science Department. An expert in complex multi-agent systems, Dr. Lerman's research on social data and other topics has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Airforce Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) and the Army Research Office (ARO).

Her current work revolves around deciphering the structure and dynamics of social media and crowdsourcing platforms, such as Twitter, Reddit, and Stack Exchange among others. Among her goals: understand the role of networks and plaform's content curation algorithms in shaping collective behavior, discover the structure of user-generated communities, predict emerging trends and group behavior, and identify the role of cognitive constraints in online interactions. Projects explore network-based and machine learning-based approaches to harvest concept hierarchies from social metadata and automate semantic annotation on the social web.

Dr. Lerman's research includes statistical text analysis, semantic modeling of data, and mathematical modeling of multi-agents systems, as well as social networks and social computing. She has published a variety of journal articles, book chapters, and refereed conference and workshop proceedings, and has written numerous workshop papers and technical reports. She also holds a patent involving document-based data extraction.

Dr. Lerman teaches a USC Computer Science Department course on social media analytics. She briefly worked for a tech startup prior to joining ISI. Dr. Lerman was awarded her Bachelor of Arts in Physics by Princeton University, and her Ph.D. in physics by the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Biography

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