I am an Associate Professor at the School of Information Sciences (the iSchool) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where I lead the Social Computing lab. We focus on Human-Centered Data Science, Social Computing/ Computational Social Science, and Responsible Computing. We integrate and advance methods from network science, natural language processing and machine learning with theories from the social sciences and humanities to study interaction-based and information-based systems. Currently, we are working on projects related to 1) studying consequences of biases in data, technology and human decision making, 2) validating classic social science theories in contemporary settings, 3) impact assessment, 4) crisis informatics, and 5) data governance/ FATE (fairness, accountability, transparency, ethics). I got my PhD from Carnegie Mellon, School of Computer Science.

News from our lab

• September 25-27, 2019: Jana giving a keynote talk at 2nd Conference of the Academy of Sociology on Digital Societies, Konstanz, Germany
• July 17-20, 2019: Jana giving a keynote talk at 5th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2)
• July 20, 2019: IC2S2 2019 presentation -- Mishra S, Fegley BD, Diesner J, & Torvik VI (2019) Self-citation is the hallmark of productive authors, of any gender
• June 19-20, 2019: Jana running the Words and Networks track at SUNBELT 2019, with 30 papers
• June 20, 2019: SUNBELT 2019 presentation at the Words and Networks track -- Dinh L, Rezapour R, & Dienser J (2019) Considering transitivity and leveraging text content to assess balance in directed networks
• June 19, 2019: SUNBELT 2019 presentation at the Using network research for impact evaluation track -- Avram M, Mishra S, & Diesner J (2019) Adversarial perturbations for identifying strategies toward biasing the perceptions of power and influence in social networks
• June 6, 2019: NAACL WASSA 2019 presentation -- Rezapour R, Shah S, & Diesner J (2019) Enhancing the measurement of social effects by capturing morality
• May 16, 2019: Jana giving a talk at the University of Cologne, Germany: "Understanding Social Structure and Behavior through Mixed-Methods Research: Bias Detection and Theory Validation" (Philosophikum Raum S93 at 14-15:30)
• May 15, 2019: Jana giving a talk at the Leibnitz Institute for German Language, Mannheim, Germany: "Responsible Social Computing" (Lecture Hall at 11:00)
• New journal paper: Kim J, & Diesner J (2019) Formational bounds of link prediction in collaboration networks. Scientometrics
• New journal paper: Mishra S, Fegley BD, Diesner J, & Torvik VI (2018) Self-citation is the hallmark of productive authors, of any gender. PLoS ONE

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