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
- Hiring: Research Assistant – AI/ML Research and Technology in Disaster Management, Student Hourly [See this job on Handshake]
- Hiring: Medical Terminology Validation Assistant, Student Hourly [See this job on Handshake]
- Upcoming: Workshop: 1st Workshop on Computational Impact Detection from Text Data at LREC 2018
- Upcoming: Workshop: The 3rd International Workshop on Social Sensing (SocialSens 2018)
- Upcoming: Words and Networks Session at Sunbelt 2018
- Oct 2017: Jana is a co-principal investigator on the "Alliance for IoBT Research on Evolving Intelligent Goal-driven Networks (IoBT REIGN)"; a multi-institutional initiative funded by the Army Research Lab (academic lead of Alliance: Tarek Abdelzaher)