Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering

Social media is an invaluable source of time-critical information during a crisis. However, emergency response and humanitarian relief organizations that would like to use this information struggle with an avalanche of social media messages, exceeding their capacity to process them. In this talk, we will look at how interdisciplinary research has enabled the creation of new tools for emergency managers, decision makers, and affected communities. These tools typically incorporate a combination of automatic processing and crowdsourcing. The talk will also look at methodological challenges of this type of research.

Bio: Carlos Castillo is a researcher on social computing with a background on information retrieval. Carlos received his Ph.D from the University of Chile (2004), and did a post-doc at Sapienza Universitá di Roma (2006) before working as a scientist and senior scientist at Yahoo! Research (2006-2012), and as a senior scientist and principal scientist at Qatar Computing Research Institute (2012-2015). He is a prolific, highly-cited researcher, who has been influential in the areas of web content quality, web credibility, and adversarial web search. His publications include an upcoming book on Big Crisis Data, a book on Information and Influence Propagation, and a monograph on Adversarial Web Search.