Sensing, Understanding, and Shaping Human Behavior
Assistant Professor,
School of Communication and Information,
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Visiting Professor,
Media Lab,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
AS6 Level 5
MR6, AS6-05-10
Today there are more than a trillion data points observing human behavior. This allows us to understand real-world social behavior at scales and resolution not possible before and at the same time brings up critical privacy challenges. This talk discusses multiple insights obtained at understanding social behavior based on multimodal interaction data (calls, bluetooth, sms, surveys) coming from a community of users. For example, they show the feasibility of automatically detecting "trusted" ties in social networks, which in turn can be critical for causing behavior change in health and wellness settings. Conversely, paying specific attention to the privacy aspect of such data, I will discuss a novel approach to measuring privacy, and also how users can be encouraged to alter their privacy behavior in social settings.
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. He obtained his bachelors and masters degrees in Computer Science from the National University of Singapore. 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 Telefonica, the Open Data Institute and the MIT. Dr Singh's research is supported by the US National Science Foundation and Google Research.