Research

Themes

Resilience and Sustainability
   I am interested in how society responds to challenges, both internal and external. Examples of external challenges are disasters such as terrorist events, hurricanes, and epidemics. Examples of internal challenges are racial and economic disparities, and aging populations and infrastructures. Societal responses are driven by human behaviors and interactions in the context of social norms, the built environment, and available resources. Resilience and sustainability, in a broad sense, refer to the ability to minimize the harm from such events (and systemic inequalities), through design and through intervention. I work on building detailed, large-scale, data-driven computational simulation models of social systems to understand these phenomena.
 

Computational Social Science
    In today's "big data" world, unprecedented amounts of information are being gathered about social systems, but it isn't necessarily the right information for the problems that face us. Developing the appropriate simulation models for the problems described above requires synthesizing the needed information by combining multiple sources of data into (a range of) models that encode both declarative and procedural knowledge. I call this model-based informatics. I am developing models of social phenomena such as racial disparities in incarceration and human behavior in the aftermath of disasters. These models are incorporated into very large-scale, realistic simulation systems known as synthetic information environments that allow high-fidelity simulations and reveal how multiple social factors interact in the emergence of the observed large-scale phenomena.
 

Complex Networks and Network Dynamics
 Many of these problems can be cast as flows in complex networks, such as the spread of infectious diseases over social contact networks, the spread of smoking behavior in adolescent friendship networks, and even the spread of the likelihood of incarceration in networks of friends and family. I work on developing and analyzing models of diffusion processes on networks, and apply them to domains such as the spread of language ("computational sociolinguistics"), information, and behavior, in addition to the problems described above.

Journal Articles

Articles in Edited Collections

Articles in Conference and Workshop Proceedings

Posters and Abstracts

Technical Reports