Description:

 The Technology & Social Behavior PhD program is excited to welcome Dr. Lexing Xie of Australian National University to campus on Thursday, December 5. Her talk, titled Understanding Online Attention: From Items to Markets, will take place 4pm-5pm in the Center for Human-Computer Interaction (Frances Searle Building 1-122), with a holiday tea and cookie reception to follow. We hope to see you there!

Talk Abstract:  What makes a video popular? What drives collective attention online? What are the similarities and differences between clicks and transactions in a market? This talk aims to address these three questions. First, I will discuss a physics-inspired stochastic time series model that explains and forecasts the seemingly unpredictable patterns of viewership over time. This model provides novel metrics for predicting expected popularity gains per share and assessing sensitivity to promotions. Next, I will describe new measurement studies and machine learning models that analyze how networks of online items influence each other’s attention. Finally, I will introduce a macroscopic view of attention, offering mathematical descriptions of market equilibriums and distributed optimization. These results lay the groundwork for our ongoing research into the computational view of attention markets and potential mechanisms for fostering a healthy online ecosystem. Additionally, I will demonstrate Influence Flower, an interactive web app and arXiv plugin designed for qualitatively visualizing the intellectual influence of academic entities. I posit that processes of academic knowledge creation affords many open questions on the dynamics of attention among crowds.

Speaker Biography: Lexing Xie is a Professor of Computer Science at the Australian National University (ANU), where she leads the ANU Computational Media Lab and directs the ANU-wide Integrated AI Network. Her research spans machine learning, computational social science, and computational economics, with a particular focus on online optimization, neural networks for sequences and networks, and applied problems such as distributed online markets, decision-making by humans and machines. Lexing received the 2023 ARC Future Fellowship and the 2018 Chris Wallace Award for Outstanding Research. Her research has garnered seven best paper and best student paper awards at ACM and IEEE conferences between 2002 and 2019. Among her editorial roles, she served as the inaugural Editor-in-Chief of the AAAI International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) and is the Program Co-Chair of ACM Multimedia 2024. Prior to joining ANU, she was a Research Staff Member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York. She holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Tsinghua University.