Culotta, Aron

Aron Culotta's research investigates computational methods to learn about human behavior from online social networks, combining machine learning, natural language processing and social network analysis. Examples include tracking diseases, measuring effectiveness of public health campaigns, informing crisis response, preventing online harassment, detecting deceptive marketing and identifying unsafe products. He obtained his PhD in computer science from the University of Massachusetts–Amherst in 2008, was a Microsoft Live Labs Fellow, a Nayar Prize Finalist and recipient of best paper awards from the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and the Conference on Computer-Supported Social Work and Social Computing. His interdisciplinary research is supported by several NSF-funded collaborations with researchers in public health, political science, marketing and emergency management.