During this episode, (26 min. long), we talk with Munmun De Choudhury, a professor of interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she leads the Social Dynamics and Wellbeing Lab.  Her research centers on using social media to better understand and improve mental health. She draws on an interdisciplinary approach, combining social computing, machine learning and natural language analysis with insights and theories from the social, behavioral and health sciences.

Our guest for this episode, (21 min. long) is Robert Ackland, a professor from the School of Sociology at the Australian National University in Canberra. Rob studies networks on the Web, and he established the Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks — VOSON for short — to provide tools for research on this topic. 

In this episode, (26 min. long) we talk with Jaime Teevan, chief scientist for Microsoft’s Experiences and Devices, where she’s charged with creating the future of productivity. She also developed the first personalized search algorithm used by Bing and introduced microproductivity into Microsoft Office. 

For this episode, (29 min. long) we talk with Danny Weitzner, a proud founding member of the Web Science Trust who will be a keynote speaker at the upcoming 2021 ACM Web Science virtual conference. He’s a 3Com Founders Principal Research Scientist at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and also the founding director of the MIT Internet Policy Research Initiative. His research interests include accountable systems, privacy, cybersecurity and online freedom of expression.

Ravindran (Ravi) Balaraman is our guest for this episode (23 min. long). He is the Mindtree faculty fellow and a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. And he also heads the Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at IIT Madras, which is the leading interdisciplinary AI research center in India and India’s first lab to join the Web Science Trust Network of laboratories from around the world. His research is pushing the boundaries of reinforcement learning, social network analysis, and data text mining.