Research

Research

C-SoDA Award Accelerator Program Winning Proposals​

2018-19 Accelerator Program seed grants were awarded to:

  • Elisa Giannone (Assistant Professor, Economics). “How Social Platforms can Reduce Inequality with a Unique Large Dataset”
  • Steven Morgan (Ph.D. Candidate, Political Science). “Rights Framing and Religious Conservatives”
  • Kevin Munger (Assistant Professor, Political Science). “Mapping Politics on YouTube: The Next Big Social Network.”
  • So Young Park (Ph.D. Candidate, Recreation, Parks, & Tourism Management) & Bing Pan (Associate Professor, RPTM) “Toward Effective Intervention for Orphanage Tourism on Twitter.”
  • Anna Squicciarini (Associate Professor, Information Science & Technology), Christopher Griffin (Applied Research Laboratory), & Diane Felmlee (Professor, Sociology). “Analysis of Cyberbullying Dynamics in Media-Rich Social Networking Sites.”

Centers, Labs, and Projects of C-SoDA Faculty and Students

  • Friendly Cities Lab
  • IGaP Lab: Interdependence in Government and Policy
  • QuantDev: The Quantitative Development Group
  • GeoVISTA Center
  • Population Research Institute
  • Intelligent Information Systems Laboratory
  • McCourtney Institute for Democracy Mood of the National Poll
  • Geoinformatics and Earth Observation Laboratory
  • Applied Cognitive Science Lab
  • Militarized Interstate Disputes (MID) Project
  • LISA: Laboratory for Intelligent Systems and Analytics
  • Design Analysis Technology Advancement (DATA) Lab
  • Media Effects Research Lab
  • Center for Big Data and Discovery Informatics
  • Machine Learning and Programming Languages Lab
  • PSU NLP LAB: The Natural Language Processing Lab at Penn State
  • Computational Social Dynamics Lab
  • Crowd-AI Lab
  • Human Language Technologies Lab
  • MAP Lab: Measurement and Applied Psychology Lab
  • The Methodology Center
  • Criminal Justice Research Center
  • Databrary
  • ChoroPhronesis
  • PIKE: Penn State Information, Knowledge, and Web
  • LIONS Center: Center for Cyber-Security, Information Privacy, and Trust
  • Center for Life Course & Longitudinal Studies

Research Themes

C-SoDA & BDSS faculty and students conduct research about a wide variety of data arising from human interaction and what and how we can learn from it, including

  • text data / natural language processing
  • social networks
  • spatial and geographic data, intensive longitudinal data
  • image data, video data, computer vision
  • deep learning / neural nets, machine learning, Bayesian statistics
  • algorithms, algorithmic bias, privacy
  • measurement, research design, causal inference
  • crowdsourcing, citizen science
  • visualization and visual analytics
all in the context of understanding important social phenomena.

Student Research under BDSS-IGERT

Since 2012, BDSS-IGERT PhD student trainees and affiliates ahve co-authored over 250 papers and related scientific products (data, software, etc.) that collectively have garnered roughly 3000 citations. For details on this research, please see the BDSS-IGERT Google Scholar Page or follow the thematic links. (Please see individual faculty pages for details on social data analytics research in the broader PSU community.)

Much of this research was catalyzed by the required ‘research rotations’ which were a part of the two year experience for each of the trainees.  Interested faculty could host one or more of the IGERT trainees in their lab/research group for 1-2 semesters to work on research questions that have big data and social science aspects (recent examples here).  These were largely arranged through the ‘matchmaking’ event held each fall semester. The first was held on September, 2014, and the last was held in September, 2017. 

Externship Project Examples

Team Project Examples

Read about the time when a team of BDSS students and faculty entered a Kaggle machine learning contest sponsored by U.S. Census and used a social scientific approach to break the contest: https://github.com/burtmonroe/BDSSKaggleCensus2012

Read about projects undertaken by student teams in IGERT classes like SoDA 501, SoDA 502, and GeoSocial Visual Analytics:

SoDA Student Dissertations