Explorations of a Data Scientist in Three Multidisciplinary Domains
with Louiqa Raschid, professor
Smith School of Business & the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies
University of Maryland
Friday, April 26, 2013
2-3 p.m.
Brickyard (BYENG) 510 [map]
abstract: Louiqa Raschid’s research in Linked Open Data has applied a range of algorithmic methods in her work to exploit ontological relatedness and shared annotations to identify interesting patterns that can summarize existing knowledge and potentially lead to discoveries. She validates results using a variety of ground truth including the sentence imprint in the literature and the phylogenetic relationships among genes.
Based on research in diffusion and influence of social data as well as features of user behavior reflecting the creation and curation of content, Raschid develops models to predict the impact of user actions in engaging attention and diffusing a message. Her research also explores a hybrid network of followers, re-tweets and mentions on Twitter. In the talk, she will identify a novel heuristic that can outperform more expensive matrix factorization methods to make personalized (future) recommendations.
The presentation will conclude with a summary of Raschid’s activities as an advocate for applying computational methods to better manage financial eco-systems. She will present a shared vision of data science for finance and a plan to develop community financial cyber infrastructure.
bio: Louiqa Raschid is a professor at the University of Maryland. She received her education at Bishop’s College and St. Bridget’s Convent in Sri Lanka, IIT Madras (B. Tech 1980) and the University of Florida (Ph.D. 1987). Raschid has spent the past two decades exploring the complexity of handling Linked Open Data, Web data, BIGDATA and streams of social data.
Raschid has led the Sahana FOSS project for disaster information management, serving as chief database architect and founding director of the Sahana Software Foundation. Sahana was initiated in the aftermath of the 2003 tsunami. It is the only comprehensive product for disaster information management that supports sharing of disaster data using open ontologies, standards and protocols and most recently it has supported Occupy Sandy.
