Welcome!
I am an Assistant Professor at the School of Information Sciences (the iSchool) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I got my PhD from Carnegie Mellon, School of Computer Science, in "Computation, Organizations and Society" (now Societal Computing).
In my group, we integrate and advance methods from Social Network Analysis (SNA), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and MachineLearning (ML) with theories from the social sciences and linguistics to answer substantive questions. Using this mixed methods and mixed data perspective, we 1) validate social network theories in contemporary settings, 2) study consequences of limitations of data provenance and data quality at scale, and 3) assess the impact of information on people. You can find my CV here.
In my lab, we conduct research in the following areas:
- Computational Social Science
Perform large-scale data analysis to discover patterns of social behavior - Human-Centered Data Science
Leverage large-scale data analysis while considering social contexts and ethical concerns - Network Science
Model and understand the complexity of connections between people, information, and technologies - Impact Assessment
Measuring the impact of information on people, communities, and society
News and Highlights from our lab
- Job Opening: Post-Doctoral Scholar for Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning (ML) and Social Network Analysis (SNA) research
- Upcoming: Words and Networks Session at Sunbelt 2018
- April 2018: Jana receives grant from Critical Infrastructure Resilience Institute (CIRI), the Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence for the project "Review and Assessment of the Usage of Computational Methods for Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) Efforts, and Scalable Measurement of Emergency Response from Text Data"
- April 2018: Jana receives Linowes fellowship from the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research for the project "Using Natural Language Processing to Measure and Understand the Description of Hurricanes Depending on the Gender of Storm Names and Geo-Location of Reporting"
- ACM HyperText 2018 paper: Mishra, S., Diesner, J. (2018). Detecting the correlation between sentiment and user-level as well as text-level meta-data from benchmark corpora