Effective Modeling in Computational Social Systems

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. This talk focuses on computational social systems; specifically on how to systematically represent socio-cultural factors, their infusion into computational models and simulations, a new paradigm for designing and analyzing the efficiency and efficacy of methodologies dealing with dynamic information, and application to real-world scenarios. Specifically we will present a framework which can infuse various forms of information within computational representations that allow for incomplete knowledge which leads to more effective and meaningful social networks analyses, and we will present methods for social networks analyses that deal with dynamically changing information. Lastly, we refer to such new network structures as Culturally-Infused Social Networks (CISN).

Biography

Eunice E. Santos is a Professor at the University of Texas, El Paso. She was also a professor at Virginia Tech and Lehigh University, and was a Senior Research Fellow for the Department of Defense Center for Technology and National Security Policy. She has served as the Chair of the Department of Computer Science, Director of the National Center for Border Security and Immigration, Director of the Center for Defense Systems Research, and Founding Director of the Institute of Defense & Security at UTEP. She is a recipient of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award (for pioneering work in Computational Social Systems). She has also received an NSF Career Award, the Robinson Faculty Award, the Spira Award for Excellence in Teaching, and other awards. She is a past member of the IDA/DARPA Defense Science Study Group, has served on several DoD senior technical advisory boards, and was the US Representative to NATO RTO Task Group on Psycho-Social Models and Methods for NATO’s EBAO Programs. She is the Founding co-Editor-in-Chief of the new IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems. She received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley. She also has BS and MS degrees in both Mathematics and Computer Science. She is a Fellow of AAAS.