PULLMAN, Wash. – Behaviors of social media and mobile computing users are tracked and modeled in order to improve computing functions and other services used by them. A computer science engineering expert will discuss “User Modeling in Social and Mobile Computing” as part of the free, public Allred Distinguished Lecture in Artificial Intelligence at 1:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 10, in ETRL 101 at Washington State University.
Qiang Yang, head of Huawei Noah’s Ark Research Lab (http://www.noahlab.com.hk/) and a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, will present several examples of user modeling based on social networks and social media.
His team has conducted research in modeling users’ information preferences on microblogs using a novel user message model. He will discuss his group’s work on extracting users’ daily activities, such as dining and shopping, that inherently reflect their habits, intents and preferences. He will discuss work on modeling user behavior in mobile computing environments for building context-aware and adaptive information agents.
Yang’s research interests are in data mining and artificial intelligence, including machine learning, planning and activity recognition. He was a vice chair of the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence (SIGART) 2010-13 and is the founding editor in chief of the ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (ACM TIST).
He is on the editorial board of several journals, including IEEE Intelligent Systems and AI Magazine, and has served as a program committee co-chair and general co-chair of several international conferences. He is trustee for the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (ITCAI) and will be the program committee chair for IJCAI 2015. He is a fellow of AAAI, IEEE, IAPR and AAAS and holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Maryland, College Park.
The Allred Lecture in Artificial Intelligence is funded by Doug and Loretta Allred. A 1973 computer science alumnus, Doug was responsible for building Cisco Systems’ multi-billion dollar global services business. The lecture is meant to enhance computer science research and undergraduate study at WSU.
Contact:
Tina Hilding, communications coordinator, WSU College of Engineering and Architecture, 509-335-5095, thilding@wsu.edu