Munmun De Choudhury

I am an Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. My research interests are in the area of computational social science, wherein I am interested in questions around making sense of human behavior as manifested via our online social footprints. I am motivated by how the availability of large-scale online social data, coupled with computational methods and resources can help us answer fundamental questions relating to our social lives: our actions, interactions, emotions and linguistic expression, both from an individual perspective, at the same time, as part of a larger collective. My recent work has focused on investigating the role of online social activity traces in improving our health and well-being. Particularly, we have explored ways of harnessing social media in being able to reason about and infer "signatures" of behavioral and public health of individuals and communities. This research bears potential in its ability to provide timely, valuable, and smart interventions as well as has implications in healthcare policy. Before moving to Georgia Tech in Spring 2014, I was a postdoctoral researcher in the neXus group at Microsoft Research, Redmond, between 2011 and 2013. I received my Ph.D in 2011 from the Department of Computer Science at Arizona State University, Tempe, where I was a part of the transdisciplinary program and venture on digital media: Arts, Media & Engineering. Following grad school, I also spent some time at the School of Communication and Information, Rutgers. Keywords: big data, collective behavior, data mining, emotion, HCI, language, machine learning, mental health, public health, social media, social network analysis, twitter PS: My husband is also an academic and he can be found here.