Workshop Instructors

Alessandro Febretti received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Chicago, a Master’s Degree in Computer Engineering from Politecnico di Milano, as well as a Master’s Degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Chicago. As a Senior Interactive Visualization Specialist at Northwestern University, Febretti’s main interests are scientific visualization design, large-scale immersive displays and human-computer interaction. Febretti works on streaming techniques for visualization, which allows researchers to interact in real time with a visualization running on a remote rendering cluster. He also works on visualization of astrophysics and chemistry datasets.

Professor Lazer is a professor of political science and computer and information science and the co-director of the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. Before joining the Northeastern faculty in fall 2009, he was an associate professor of public policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and director of its Program on Networked Governance. He holds a PhD in political science from the University of Michigan. Professor Lazer’s research centers on social networks; governance, or how the patterns of institutional relations yield functional or dysfunctional systems; and technology and its use in communication. An authority on social networks, he has written several papers on the diffusion of information among interest groups and between these groups and the government. He is the co-editor of Governance and Information Technology: From Electronic Government to Information Government and also written extensively on the use of DNA in the criminal justice system.

Andrew Mao is a postdoc at Microsoft Research in NYC in the Computational Social Science group. His work focuses on studying collective intelligence and social interaction on the Internet, including teamwork in online communities and coordination in crowdsourcing systems. He specializes in designing and gathering data from real-time, interactive, web-based behavioral experiments. Andrew received his PhD from Harvard University in 2015, where he was advised by Yiling Chen.

Jason Radford is a Doctoral Candidate in Sociology at the University of Chicago and a Visiting Researcher at Northeastern University. His research focuses on organizational, economic, and political processes, social inequality, and methodology. He was one of the founders of the Computational Social Science workshop and winner of the Mellon Dissertation Writing Fellowship at the University of Chicago.

Amit Sharma is a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research. He uses a combination of data mining and experimental methods to understand the underlying decision processes that shape people's activities online. Often, this means tackling causal inference questions around the impact of socio-technical agents such as recommendation systems and social network feeds. His work has led to data-driven methods for causal inference that are better suited than traditional methods in settings where adequate observational data is available. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University and is a recipient of the 2012 Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenges Award.