Human Data Science, by Prof. Robert West

Inaugural Lecture - Human Data Science
Abstract
Today, humans and computers inherently coexist. Not only do digital platforms capture human behavior, they shape human behavior. Much of human behavior is what it is precisely because it takes place on digital platforms. Therefore, in the 21st century, the study of humans and the study of computers are inseparable. In the EPFL Data Science Lab (dlab), we embrace the close coexistence of humans and computers and leverage the massive amounts of data that humans generate when interacting with computers in order to derive useful insights into human behavior, build causal models of human behavior, and develop practical tools, algorithms, and methods, with the ultimate goal of improving human lives using data. In this talk, I showcase how my lab works toward this goal by blending artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and computational social science.
About the speaker
Robert West is an associate professor of computer science at EPFL, where he heads the Data Science Lab (dlab). His research aims to make sense of large amounts of data by developing and applying algorithms and techniques in natural language processing, machine learning, and computational social science. Typically, the data he works with is generated by humans (e.g., natural language or behavioral traces), and frequently it is collected on the Web (e.g., using wikis, online news, social media, server logs, online games). Bob received his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University (2016), his MSc from McGill University (2010), and his undergraduate degree from Technische Universität München (2007). He is a Wikimedia Foundation Research Fellow, an Associate Editor of ICWSM and EPJ Data Science, and a co-founder of the Wiki Workshop and the Applied Machine Learning Days. His work has won several awards, including best/outstanding paper awards at ICWSM’21, ICWSM’19, and WWW’13, a Google Faculty Research Award, a Facebook Research Award, the ICWSM’22 Adamic-Glance Distinguished Young Researcher Award, and an SNSF Starting Grant.