Computational Socio-Cultural Modeling

by Eunice E. Santos

Virginia Tech

Date

Monday, April 20, 2009

Time

4:00 p.m. — 5:00 p.m. (Note special time)

Place

IMU State Room East

Abstract:  Understanding and analyzing how human beings respond, adapt, and react is a major scientific endeavor. Human beings are inherently complex and how we behave and interact is not easily modeled or quantified. At the same time, real-world decisions are made based on supposed expectations of human behavior.  So much of classic computational modeling has focused on exploring physical and biological phenomena which are based on scientific theory. Whereas, in human modeling, socio-cultural factors are a critical component and not readily expressed in mathematical terms.  As such, the realm of socio-cultural modeling creates a need to understand how or when to leverage the classical approaches coupled with the need to incorporate such socio-cultural research concepts.  Success of the work can only be accomplished through true interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary research spanning multiple fields including computer science, engineering, mathematics, and the social sciences.  In this talk, we discuss the way forward for effective and efficient computational socio-cultural modeling. I will present new work in socio-cultural representation, the capability to infuse such factors into social networks analysis, and new techniques for efficient real-time analysis of human network constructs.
Biography:  Eunice E. Santos has B.S. and M.S. degrees in both Mathematics and Computer Science, and received a PhD in 1995 from the University of California, Berkeley in Computer Science. She is currently serving an appointment as a Senior Research Fellow for the Center for Technology and National Security Policy in Washington, DC.  From 1995-2000 Dr. Santos was a faculty member in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Lehigh University. Since 2000, Dr. Santos is the Director of the Laboratory for Computation, Information & Distributed Processing, and an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and in the Genetics, Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Program at Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University. Dr. Santos has been awarded an NSF CAREER grant, the Spira Award for Excellence in Teaching, and the Robinson Faculty Award. She is also currently named to the Top Ten Teacher's List in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech. She is on the editorial board of Scientific Programming, and subject area editor for the Journal of Supercomputing. She is a past member of the DARPA/IDA Defense Science Study Group.

Colloquium Provided By:

the School of Informatics