Brendan T. O'Connor

Associate Professor, College of Information and Computer Sciences
Associate Director, Computational Social Science Institute
University of Massachusetts Amherst
brenocon@cs.umass.edu, @brendan642, @brenocon.bsky.social
Room 238, Computer Science Building, 140 Governors Drive, Amherst, MA 01003

I am an associate professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at UMass Amherst. My group is the SLANG Lab, part of UMass NLP. I am also an associate director of the Computational Social Science Institute, and affiliated with the UMass CogSci and the Centers for Data Science and Intelligent Information Retrieval.

Links: CV, Bio, Teaching, Talks, Notes, Misc.

Some current things:

Some current/recent collaborative projects:

Research:
What can statistical text analysis tell us about society? I develop text analysis methods that can help answer social science questions. I'm interested in statistical machine learning and natural language processing, especially when informed by or applied to areas like political science or sociolinguistics. My work often uses text data from news and social media.

There is a rich set of other faculty at UMass interested in areas from computational social science to natural language processing. See the Computational Social Science Institute (CSSI) website, and UMass NLP affiliates.

Background:
I joined UMass after receiving my PhD from Carnegie Mellon University's Machine Learning Department. I have also been a Visiting Fellow at Harvard IQSS, and interned with the Facebook Data Science team. Before grad school, I worked on crowdsourced annotations at CrowdFlower / Dolores Labs, and natural language search at Powerset. I started studying the intersection of AI and social science as an undergrad/masters student in Stanford Symbolic Systems (cognitive science, more or less).

Link: Full bio.

Papers/Publications

(For others, see Google Scholar or my CV.)
@brenocon@masto.ai