DINS PhD Student Speaker Series Slated for March 23, 2023

DINS PhD Student Speaker Series Slated for March 23, 2023

 

Please join the Department of Informatics and Networked Systems for a series of presentations on research being done by PhD students in the Department!

The presentations will take place on Thursday, March 23, 2023, from 3:30 pm to 4:30 pm in the Third Floor Theatre of the IS Building (135 North Bellefield Avenue).  We are pleased to present:


Rr. Nefrianna

Title: I’m Exposed Therefore I Believe and I Believe Therefore I’m Exposed: Investigating the Interdependencies Among Exposure, Belief, and Spread of Hate-Based Conspiracy Theories

Abstract: As streams of hatred and violence targeted at specific groups have been motivated by conspiratorial beliefs, understanding the factors that lead individuals to become exposed to, adopt, and disseminate hate-based conspiracy theories becomes crucial. To address this challenge, we conducted a novel study on the interdependency among the exposure, belief, and spread of hate-based conspiracy theories, as well as the role of online social networks in this ecosystem. Specifically, we conducted an online survey from December 2022 to January 2023 to gather respondents’ experiences in seeing four representative hate-based conspiracy theories, their beliefs, and their possibilities to spread. From 652 respondents’ data, we found that 81.8% had been exposed to at least one of the hate-based conspiracy theories in social media, two-thirds believed in at least one, and 23.4% said they were likely to spread. Via our structural equation models, we showed that: 1) prior exposure was a significant factor in predicting belief, 2) prior belief was a significant factor in predicting exposure, and 3) belief was a significant factor in predicting spread. Above all else, our study contributes to understanding how online homophily in political views was significantly associated with the likelihood of spread.

Bio: Rr. Nefriana is a second-year Ph.D. student in Information Science. She is supervised by Dr. Yu-Ru Lin and is a Pitt Computational Social Dynamics Lab (PICSO) member. Nefriana’s research interests include socio-demographic measurement, community dynamics, and computational social science.

 

Alireza Javadian Sabet

Skills Acquisition: How Higher Education Meets Workforce Activities?

Abstract: Education is one of the crucial factors contributing to economic growth and social progress. While labor economics has evolved to study workers' skills to explain labor tr

ends, a similar lens has yet to be applied to workforce development at scale.

In this work, we investigate how college educations are mechanisms for workforce development. To do so, we develop a framework to extract the skills being taught at higher education institutions using their curriculum and map them to work activities required by the labor market.

Since Minority Serving Institutions (MSI) should serve as an engine for upward mobility, using a large-scale dataset composed of more than 3M course syllabi,  we compare the curriculum of MSI with Ivy League colleges in terms of skills. The results show that in some fields of study (FOS) such as Computer Science, the skills’ evolution in MSI is similar to as in Ivy League colleges. However, there are some FOS such as Marketing in which MSI follows the opposite approach of Ivy League Colleges for curriculum development.

The problem area is of huge significance as higher education stakeholders are seeking new guidelines to adapt themselves to the future of work.

Bio: Alireza Javadian Sabet is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Informatics and Networked Systems (DINS) at the University of Pittsburgh working under the supervision of Prof. Morgan Frank. He is a Computational Social Scientist conducting research on means to empirically study workforce development through education in order to inform policy decisions and improve upward mobility and access to opportunities. He holds a master's degree in computer science and engineering from Politecnico di Milano (PoliMi) in Italy where he worked as a research fellow for two years at the Data Science Lab and DEpendable Evolvable Pervasive Software Engineering (DEEP-SE) group. His research interests lie in computational social science, knowledge extraction from social networks, business analysis, and context-aware recommender systems.