When I was asked to write this blog post, the first name popped up is Kathleen Carley. Although Dr.Tapia stole my thunder by mentioning her as an example at the class, I still decided to write something about her, because I have been hearing her name and citing her work for quite a while and searching for 'Carley' in my EndNote will return 29 papers.
Dr. Carley spent her years as a student at Boston. She received S.B. degrees in Economics and Political Science from MIT and her Ph.D. was from Harvard Sociology. Although Dr.Tapia considered her as a sociologist, I believe the training in Economics at MIT gave her a different perspective and skill set. She is definitely an outlier among sociologists. I would rather call her an interdisciplinary researcher with a very diverse academic background. Sociology might just be one of her 'gas stops' along her way in interdisciplinary research. Sorry Andrea :)
She is now a professor of Computation, Organization and Society at the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of her research, she also holds join positions at the Institute for Software Research, Social and Decision Science, Public Policy and Management, Industrial Administration and Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon.
Her research combines cognitive science, social networks and computer science to address complex social and organizational problems. Her specific research areas are dynamic network analysis, computational social and organization theory, adaptation and evolution, text mining, and the impact of telecommunication technologies and policy on communication, information diffusion, disease contagion and response within and among groups particularly in disaster or crisis situations.
So where and why is she famous?
I would say she is most famous in the community of computational social and organizational scientists. From my experience, most active researchers in this area know of her and a lot of them have worked with her. Why? She is one of the creators and pioneers of this emerging area, although the area is still under development. She is the missionary who introduced new techniques to tackle problems that cannot be solved with traditional approaches. She created and directed a research center that has about 40 staff and students. She founded a professional association (North American Association of Computational Social and Organizational Science) and played important roles in the development of the journal of Computational Mathematical and Organizational Science.
She is also known to some computer scientists and has published in AI communities. In my opinion, her major contribution to AI, especially distributed AI (or multi-agent AI), is bringing new real-world problems that haven't been considered by computer scientists and thus expanding the application domain of computer science research. More importantly, when solving new problems, she also discovered new techniques and contributed back to computer science research, such as data mining and network analysis. To my knowledge, she is among the few researchers who can connect the computational social and organizational science community and the AI community. That is probably also why she's now at a computer science school (or maybe it was her position in a computer science school that enable her to connect with computer scientists).
I am glad she will come to IST and am looking forward to her talk.
Dr. Carley spent her years as a student at Boston. She received S.B. degrees in Economics and Political Science from MIT and her Ph.D. was from Harvard Sociology. Although Dr.Tapia considered her as a sociologist, I believe the training in Economics at MIT gave her a different perspective and skill set. She is definitely an outlier among sociologists. I would rather call her an interdisciplinary researcher with a very diverse academic background. Sociology might just be one of her 'gas stops' along her way in interdisciplinary research. Sorry Andrea :)
She is now a professor of Computation, Organization and Society at the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of her research, she also holds join positions at the Institute for Software Research, Social and Decision Science, Public Policy and Management, Industrial Administration and Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon.
Her research combines cognitive science, social networks and computer science to address complex social and organizational problems. Her specific research areas are dynamic network analysis, computational social and organization theory, adaptation and evolution, text mining, and the impact of telecommunication technologies and policy on communication, information diffusion, disease contagion and response within and among groups particularly in disaster or crisis situations.
So where and why is she famous?
I would say she is most famous in the community of computational social and organizational scientists. From my experience, most active researchers in this area know of her and a lot of them have worked with her. Why? She is one of the creators and pioneers of this emerging area, although the area is still under development. She is the missionary who introduced new techniques to tackle problems that cannot be solved with traditional approaches. She created and directed a research center that has about 40 staff and students. She founded a professional association (North American Association of Computational Social and Organizational Science) and played important roles in the development of the journal of Computational Mathematical and Organizational Science.
She is also known to some computer scientists and has published in AI communities. In my opinion, her major contribution to AI, especially distributed AI (or multi-agent AI), is bringing new real-world problems that haven't been considered by computer scientists and thus expanding the application domain of computer science research. More importantly, when solving new problems, she also discovered new techniques and contributed back to computer science research, such as data mining and network analysis. To my knowledge, she is among the few researchers who can connect the computational social and organizational science community and the AI community. That is probably also why she's now at a computer science school (or maybe it was her position in a computer science school that enable her to connect with computer scientists).
I am glad she will come to IST and am looking forward to her talk.
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