Kiran Garimella is a PhD student at Aalto University. His research focuses on identifying
and combating polarization on social media. In general he is interested in making use of
large public datasets to understand human behaviour. Prior to starting his PhD, he worked
as a Research Engineer at Yahoo Research, QCRI and as an intern at Carnegie Mellon University,
LinkedIn and Amazon. His work on reducing polarization received the best student paper award
at WSDM’17.

AG 1, AG 2, AG 3, AG 4, AG 5, SWS, RG1, MMCI   Info

Expert Audience

English

90 Minutes

Saarbrücken

Social media has brought a revolution on how people get exposed to information and how
they are consuming news. Beyond the undoubtedly large number of advantages and capabilities
brought by social-media platforms, a point of criticism has been the creation of filter
bubbles or echo chambers, caused by social homophily as well as by algorithmic personalisation
and recommendation in content delivery. In this talk, I will present the methods we developed
to (i) detect and quantify the existence of polarization on social media, (ii) monitor the
evolution of polarisation over time, and finally, (iii) devise methods to overcome the effects
caused by increased polarization. We build on top of existing studies and ideas from social
science with principles from graph theory to design algorithms which are language independent,
domain agnostic and scalable to large number of users.

Annika Meiser

9303 9105

--email hidden

passcode not visible

logged in users only