Understanding Multilingual Communities through Analysis of Code-switching Behaviors in Social Media Discussions
A Track in the IEEE Big Data 2019 Big Data Cup
Computer Scientist at Army Research Laboratory, Washington D.C., U.S.
Dr Michelle Vanni is a Computer Scientist in the Multilingual Computing and Analytics group at the US Army Research Laboratory. Her research interests have included human evaluation of machine translation engines, measuring analyst leveraging of information extraction output for problem solving, and, more recently, understanding aspects of social meaning in contextualized linguistic artifacts, such as code-switching and discourse marking, in online forums. For nearly a decade, ARL has engaged with NATO scientists analyzing social networks and detecting communities in social media data. Recent collaboration with the Australian authors of the RAPID social media data collection and analytics tool, with its specialized handling of multilingual content, is facilitating large-scale sociolinguistic analysis of code-switching communities. Dr. Vanni holds PhD, MS and BS in Linguistics from Georgetown University, with concentrations in computing and theory, and a MA in language from Middlebury College, Vermont, USA.
Defence Science and Technology Group (DSTG)
Dr Lucia Falzon is a Senior Research Scientist at the Defence Science and Technology (DST) Group in the Australian Department of Defence. Her role entails developing collaborative research programs to support decision-making and enhance situational awareness of the information environment. She has led an ongoing collaborative program with the University of Melbourne since 2005. The program has delivered research on new methods for social network analysis, as well as research into the mechanisms of social diffusion over social media networks. A significant outcome has been the development of a social media data collection and real-time analytics software tool, the Real-time Analytics Platform for Interactive Data-mining (RAPID).
School of Computing and Information SystemsThe University of Melbourne
Shanika Karunasekera is a Professor in the School of Computing and Information Systems. She leads the Software Engineering program in the School. Her current research interests include distributed system engineering, distributed data-mining and social media analytics. She received the B.Sc. degree in electronics and telecommunications engineering from the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, in 1990 and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Cambridge, U.K., in 1995. From 1995 to 2002, she was a Software Engineer and a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff with Lucent Technologies, Bell Labs Innovations, USA.
Dr Harwood is a senior lecturer in the School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne. His research interests are in the areas of Peer-to-Peer Computing and High-Performance Interconnection Networks, with focus on peer-to-peer algorithms, decentralized protocols and large scale, high performance systems. His recent research is with the Defence Science and Technology Group, Edinburgh, South Australia, in large scale stream processing systems for real-time social media analysis. He holds a B.Eng. (ME), BIT and PhD in computer science from Griffith University, Australia.
Prarthana Padia is a graduate student pursuing Master of Science (Computer Science) from The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia. She received her B.Tech. degree in Information and Communication Technology from Ahmedabad University, India in 2017. Her current research interests include machine learning and data mining for social media analysis.