12.10 | What Data Science Can Tell Us About the Sharing Economy and the Structure of Hidden Networks

演讲者 Prof. Bruno Abrahao 头衔职位 Assistant Professor of Information Systems and Business Analytics and a Global Network Assistant Professor at New York University 时间 2019 年 12 月 10 日（周二）下午 2:00 地点 张江校区计算机楼 405 联系人 陈阳 ，chenyang@fudan.edu.cn

演讲简介

By producing data on a scale unimaginable even a few years ago, the Web is transforming the way we learn about our own behavior. In this scenario, Data Science is emerging as a multidisciplinary endeavor that combines decades of knowledge from disparate fields, such as statistics, computer science, and the social sciences. This new science has the potential to deliver billions of dollars of value to the economy and a great deal of social capital to society.

The first part of my talk will focus on one particular domain of Data Science where I see a great wealth of opportunities to investigate social behavior: using the Web to engage volunteers to participate in large-scale online randomized experiments. I will present a case from collaborations with major companies in the sharing economy, namely Airbnb and Couchsurfing. Our results demonstrate that reputation systems can serve as mechanisms to reduce obstacles to the growth and to the healthy function of these businesses, such as social biases and suboptimal market matchings.

In the second part I will switch to discuss the foundations of Data Science. Even though in recent years there has been extraordinary progress in deriving business value from data, the field is still in its early stages; I see tremendous opportunities for growing and strengthening its foundations. A critical long-term goal of the Data Science community concerns the provision of rigorous guarantees on how much actionable information we can derive from a given amount of data. Our research shows evidence that this can be accomplished, as illustrated by the example of learning hidden network structures from records of information cascades.

关于讲者

Bruno Abrahao is an Assistant Professor of Information Systems and Business Analytics and a Global Network Assistant Professor at New York University. He is also a faculty member in the Center for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. Professor Abrahao holds a PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University, affiliated with the Computer Science and with the Sociology departments, as well as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Microsoft Research AI. Professor Abrahao’s research largely focuses on the role of technology and Artificial Intelligence in social systems. He focuses on theoretical and applied aspects of Data Science and Machine Learning to investigate social and business processes, on the structure of evolving complex systems, such as social and information networks, and on computational social science.