Keynote Speakers

  • Eric Horvitz

    Distinguished Scientist & Managing Director
    Microsoft Research

    Pursuing Planetary-Scale Pulses on Health and Well-being

    I will describe how anonymized behavioral data drawn from online services can be harnessed as large-scale sensor networks for health and well-being. I will highlight opportunities for garnering insights and performing inferences and predictions about health via analyses of signals expressed in social media, web searching and browsing, and interpersonal communications. I will frame directions by presenting studies that consider different types of data, and show how behavioral signals can complement more traditional studies performed in medicine, public health, psychology, and sociology. Finally, I will reflect about challenges and directions on privacy and ethics that may come to the fore with efforts to leverage behavioral data in studies of health and well-being.

    Eric Horvitz is a distinguished scientist at Microsoft Research where he serves as the managing director of Microsoft Research at Redmond. His interests span theoretical and practical challenges with machine perception, learning, inference, and decision making. He has been elected a fellow of AAAI, AAAS, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Engineering, and has been inducted into the CHI Academy. He has served as president of the AAAI, chair of the AAAS Section on Information, Computing, and Communications, and on the NSF CISE Advisory Committee. He received PhD and MD degrees at Stanford University. Information on publications, collaborations, and activities can be found at http://research.microsoft.com/~horvitz.

  • Keith N. Hampton

    Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, School of Communication and Information, Rutgers University

    The Social Pressures of Social Media

    A primary affordance of social media is that enables persistent and pervasive contact with social ties across the life course. While such contact provides opportunities to maintain networks for access to social capital, awareness may also have its drawbacks. Based on survey data collected from a national sample of American adults, I explore how awareness of the activities and opinions of social ties through social media compares to awareness of social ties in everyday life for: 1) the contagion of stress, and 2) democratic deliberation.

    Keith N. Hampton is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, School of Communication and Information, at Rutgers University. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of Toronto in sociology, and a B.A. in sociology from the University of Calgary. Before joining the faculty at Rutgers, he was a member of the faculty in the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, and a faculty member in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research interests focus on the relationship between new information and communication technologies, social networks, and the urban environment.