Opportunities of Social Media in Personal and Societal Well-Being – Munmun De Choudhury (Georgia Tech)

When:
September 26, 2014 all-day
2014-09-26T00:00:00-04:00
2014-09-27T00:00:00-04:00
Where:
3400 N Charles St
Baltimore, MD 21218
USA

Abstract
People are increasingly using social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, to share their thoughts and opinions with their contacts. Consequently, there has been a corresponding surge of interest in utilizing continuing streams of evidence from social media on posting activity to reflect on people’s psyches and social milieus. In this talk, I will discuss how the ubiquitous use of social media as well as the abundance and growing repository of such data bears potential to provide a new type of “lens” for inferring mental and behavioral health challenges in individuals and populations, namely, postpartum depression, unipolar depression, eating disorders, and post-traumatic stress and anxiety. I will also discuss clinical and design implications, as well as our social and ethical responsibilities around interpretation and automatic inference of health states of people from their online social activities.
Biography
Munmun De Choudhury is currently an assistant professor at the School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Tech and a faculty associate with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. Munmun’s research interests are in computational social science, with a specific focus on reasoning about our health behaviors and wellbeing from social digital footprints. At Georgia Tech, she directs the Social Dynamics and Wellbeing Lab. Munmun has been a recipient of the Grace Hopper Scholarship, recognized with an IBM Emergent Leaders in Multimedia award, and recipient of ACM SIGCHI 2014 best paper award and ACM SIGCHI honorable mention awards in 2012 and 2013. Previously, Munmun was a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research, and obtained her PhD from Arizona State University in 2011.

Center for Language and Speech Processing