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Brendan T. O'ConnorAssociate Professor, College of Information and Computer SciencesAssociate Director, Computational Social Science Institute University of Massachusetts Amherst Email: brenocon@cs.umass.edu Twitter: @brendan642 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 University of Massachusetts Amherst. My group is the SLANG Lab, part of UMass NLP. I am also affiliated with the Computational Social Science Institute, the Initiative in Cognitive Science, and the Centers for Data Science and Intelligent Information Retrieval.
Links: CV, Bio, Teaching, Talks, Notes, Misc.
I'm on sabbatical and parental leave in 2022.
Some previous research talks:
Some current collaborative projects:
Press coverage:
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.
See also my earlier research statement or publications below.
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 the 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 and masters student in
Stanford
Symbolic Systems (cognitive science).
Link: Full bio.