Assistant Professor at SIS receives two NSF awards for Computational Social Science Research
09/26/2016
Dr. Yu-Ru Lin, assistant professor at SIS, has recently been awarded two research grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Dr. Lin received a three-year grant totaling $188,369 for her project titled, "DAPPR: Diffusion Analytics for Public Policy Research." She also received a two-year grant totaling $181,012 for her project titled, "Collective Sense Making Following a Terrorist Attack: The Immediate and Long-Term Impact on Public Resilience."
In collaboration with researchers from the Pennsylvania State University, University of Iowa, and several other research institutions across the country, the "DAPPR: Diffusion Analytics for Public Policy Research" project will support Dr. Lin's research for understanding the iterative processes of policy-making. Particularly, the project will investigate cutting-edge methods of text, network, and visual analytics in order to track how the development of public policies across states in the U.S. influence one another.
To learn more about this project, check out the NSF’s web site.
Dr. Lin’s project "Collective Sense Making Following a Terrorist Attack: The Immediate and Long-Term Impact on Public Resilience" will investigate the impacts of the mass outpouring of reaction and information sharing on social media in response to terrorist events.
With this project, Dr. Lin and her group aim to analyze the public's immediate social and emotional reactions to attacks as well as any longer-term changes in their communication behavior. This research will not only contribute to improving responses to specific terrorist attacks, but also to enhancing the public’s understanding of the specific means through which terrorism wields social influence.
To learn more about this project, visit the NSF’s web site.
"In this era of Big Data, people have started exploring what impacts Big Data Analytics can have on society—from health to business to education,” said Dr. Lin. “These two projects will begin to broaden the view of ‘data’ in the social sciences, and illustrate what valuable new insights, research methodologies, and perspectives can be developed to answer questions within the social sciences field."
Dr. Lin joined the School of Information Sciences’ faculty in 2013. Her research interests include studying social and political networks, as well as computational and visualization methods for understanding network data. For more information about Dr. Lin’s research and expertise, visit her web site at: http://yurulin.com.
