Invited Speakers

Kenneth Benoit is Professor of Quantitative Social Research Methods, and Head of the Department of Methodology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is also Part-Time Professor in the Department of Political Science at Trinity College Dublin. He received his Ph.D. (1998) from Harvard University, Department of Government. His research focuses on automated, quantitative methods for processing large amounts of textual data, mainly political texts and social media. Interest span from the analysis of big data, including social media, and methods of text mining.

Joanna J. Bryson is a transdisciplinary researcher on the structure and dynamics of human- and animal-like intelligence. Her research covers topics ranging from artificial intelligence, through autonomy and robot ethics, and on to human cooperation. She holds degrees in Psychology from Chicago (AB) and Edinburgh (MPhil), and Artificial Intelligence from Edinburgh (MSc) and MIT (ScD). She has additional professional research experience from Oxford, Harvard, and LEGO, and technical experience in Chicago's financial industry, and international organization management consultancy. Bryson is presently a Reader (associate professor) at the University of Bath, and an affiliate of Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy.

Simon DeDeo is an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, where he runs the Laboratory for Social Minds, and external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute.

Jacob Eisenstein is an Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. He works on statistical natural language processing, focusing on computational sociolinguistics, social media analysis, discourse, and machine learning. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, a member of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Young Investigator Program, and was a SICSA Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. His work has also been supported by the National Institutes for Health, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Google. Jacob was a Postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Illinois. He completed his Ph.D. at MIT in 2008, winning the George M. Sprowls dissertation award.

Dirk Hovy is an associate professor in NLP at the computer science department of the University of Copenhagen. His research focuses on computational sociolinguistics, the interaction of demographic factors and language use on statistical models, and its consequences for performance, fairness, and personalization. He is also interested in ethical questions of bias and algorithmic fairness in ML in general, and recently co-organized the EACL-workshop Ethics in NLP. Dirk received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Southern California, and holds a Magister in sociolinguistics from the University of Marburg, Germany. Dirk has authored multiple papers on various NLP topics, and shared best paper awards at EACL 2014, *SEM 2014, and WNUT 2015.

David Mimno joined the Information Science department at Cornell University in the Fall of 2013. Prior to that, he was a postdoctoral researcher with David Blei at Princeton. He received his PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, with Andrew McCallum. He tweets @dmimno. Before UMass, David Mimno worked for an internet auction startup, the NLP group at the University of Sheffield, and the Perseus Project, a cultural heritage digital library. He has a particular interest in historical texts and languages.

​Dennis Tenen's research happens at the intersection of people, texts, and technology. His recent work appears on the pages of Amodern, boundary 2, Computational Culture, Modernism/modernity, Public Books, and LA Review of Books on topics that range from book piracy to algorithmic composition, unintelligent design, and history of data visualization. He teaches a variety of classes in fields of literary theory, new media studies, and critical computing in the humanities. Tenen is a co-founder of Columbia's Group for Experimental Methods in the Humanities and author of the forthcoming Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation (Stanford UP, 2017).​

​Rebekah K. Tromble is a lecturer of political science at Leiden University. She is interested in political communication—especially via digital media—, relevant research methodology, social movement studies, and Muslims and politics. She is currently working on several projects involving how politicians around the world use social media to engage members of the public in dialog, exploring similarities and differences between politicians’ online and offline communication during election campaigns, and digital research methodology, examining the biases that are likely to be introduced by common data collection techniques from online media.

​Jane Winters is Professor of Digital Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. She has led or co-directed a range of digital projects, including most recently Big UK Domain Data for the Arts and Humanities; Digging into Linked Parliamentary Metadata; Traces through Time: Prosopography in Practice across Big Data; the Thesaurus of British and Irish History as SKOS; and Born Digital Big Data and Approaches for History and the Humanities. Her research is focused on digital history, and in particular on the ways in which historians can begin to make use of web and other born-digital archives.