Colloquium: Eunice E. Santos

You are cordially invited to attend this School of Informatics colloquium (please note special day, time, and place):

Monday, April 20, 2009
4:00 p.m.
IMU State Room East

Eunice E. Santos, Virginia Tech, will present, “Computational Socio-Cultural Modeling.”

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.