Group Members

Dr. Vivek Singh is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. Before joining Rutgers, he was a post-doctoral researcher the MIT Media Lab. He holds a Ph.D. in Information and Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine. His work has been published in multiple leading scientific venues (Science, Proceedings of the IEEE), has received significant media coverage (BBC, New York Times, Wall Street Journal). He was selected as one of the ‘Emerging Leaders in Multimedia Research’ by IBM Research Labs in 2009, and he won the 2013 ‘Big Data for Social Good’ datathon organized by Telefónica, the Open Data Institute and the MIT.

As a communication theorist I am interested in the cognitive changes that occur in human behavior as a result of online interactions. I am currently looking at information sharing and disclosure habits in online and offline settings and am fascinated by the paradoxes that appear in attitudes and behaviors. I am also interested in studying persuasion and influence in online settings and how this social persuasion can be used to enforce change in physical behavior.

Current Projects:
Predicting Privacy Attitudes from Phone Use Information: This project is aimed at leveraging cell phone usage information to automatically infer the user’s privacy attitudes.
Privacy Paradox: Existing literature talks discusses the difference in concerns on information disclosure compared to information sharing practices displayed in online social networks. This project reviews the current literature to understand the underlying causes of this paradox
Effect of nudges on online social behaviors: Understand the use of influence as a strategy in improving privacy behavior in online social networks.

Recent Publications
Ghosh I., and Singh, V.K. (2016). Predicting privacy attitudes using phone metadata. In Proceedings, International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling & Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation, Washington DC, June 28-July, Volume 1.

Souvick Ghosh is a Doctoral student in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. He completed his bachelors and masters degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Jadavpur University, India. He is passionate about technology and its application in solving social problems. His research interests include information retrieval and human information behavior. His work involves application of machine learning and natural language processing techniques in multimodal information retrieval. He is currently working on automatic detection and prevention of cyberbullying. He received the prestigious DAAD Scholarship in 2015.

Recent Papers:
Ghosh S., Singh V.K., and Jose C. (2016). Multimodal Cyberbullying Detection.

Christin Jose is a final year Masters student in the Computer Science department at Rutgers University. His primary area of interests are machine learning, clustering algorithms, dimensionality reduction, streaming algorithms, randomized algorithms. He is involved in the design of the machine learning algorithms that are used for the research. He performs feature and data engineering for various datasets. He is currently working on automatic detection and prevention of cyberbullying. He also works on building an instagram image dataset which includes all the socio-textual-visual features which could be handy in the future projects. He loves building cool android apps, playing chess and doing some cool hacks!!

www.christinjose.co
christin.jose@rutgers.edu
www.linkedin.com/in/christinjose

Recent Papers:
Ghosh S., Singh V.K., and Jose C. (2016). Multimodal Cyberbullying Detection.

Teng Long is pursuing his Master’s degree in the Computer Science department at Rutgers University. He is interested in machine learning algorithms and everything that could lead to AI-completeness. In BIRG, he primarily works on applying machine learning algorithms to the data we have. And he has incorporated deep learning into the feature extraction phase of cyberbullying image data via Tensorflow. Recently, he is working on finding correlations between phone usage and mental health.

I am currently a junior in the Rutgers Business School pursuing a degree in Business Analytics and Information Technology (BAIT). I am personally interested in this feel because I feel that there is potential in Data Mining/ Data Science and Big Data. I noticed that whenever I was browsing something on the internet, sometime later, some of the products I was searching up showed up on the side of the browser in an ad. I think it is pretty cool how companies like Google, Amazon etc are using these massive amounts of data and mining down into relevant information. Currently I am looking into the correlation between “social capital and phone usage”.