People
Faculty
Olga Boichak
Dr Olga Boichak is a Lecturer in Digital Cultures at the University of Sydney. She is a media sociologist with expertise in computational social science. Before joining the University of Sydney in 2019, Olga was a research associate at the Center for Computational and Data Sciences (Syracuse University, USA) and a visiting scholar at the Social Media Lab (Ryerson University, Canada). Together with colleagues she developed tools and analytic techniques that support social listening, information literacy, bot detection, and decision-making in complex scenarios.
Eduardo Altmann
Eduardo Altmann is a Professor in Mathematics at the University of Sydney. He is a mathematician/physicist with expertise in the dynamics of natural language, including the use of automated text classification methods and information theoretic measures for classifying text similarity. He, along with co-workers, developed stochastic block model methods for network and text analysis.
Tristram Alexander
Tristram Alexander is an Associate Professor in Physics at the University of Sydney. He is a physicist with expertise in the modelling of nonlinear dynamical systems with many interacting elements, including social media dynamics. He has developed a suite of processing tools to identify and analyse communities in Twitter stream data.Speakers
Timothy Graham
Dr Timothy Graham is Senior Lecturer in Digital Media at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). His research combines computational methods with social theory to study online networks and platforms, with a particular interest in online bots and trolls, disinformation, and online ratings and rankings devices. He develops open source software tools for social media data analysis, and has published in journals such as Information, Communication & Society, Information Polity, Big Data & Society, and Social Media + Society. In 2021, Tim was announced as an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award recipient and was awarded funding for his project, Combating Coordinated Inauthentic Behaviour on Social Media.
Jason Thompson
A/Prof Thompson works at the University of Melbourne’s Transport, Health and Urban Design (THUD) Research Laboratory within the Melbourne School of Design. Here, he focuses on the translation of research into practice across the areas of urban design, transportation safety, public health, post-injury rehabilitation, public policy, and health system design. His work has pioneered the use of agent-based models and computational social science in areas of traditional health and insurance system design, urban design, infectious disease, and transportation safety. A/Prof Thompson holds a PhD in Medicine, Masters in Clinical Psychology, and a Bachelor of Science with Honours and is a current Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Award (DECRA) Fellow.
Kate Lowrie
Kate Lowrie commenced her career in research ethics at The University of Queensland in 2008, before moving to Sydney where she worked at the Cancer Institute NSW and The Centre for Health Record Linkage (CHeReL). Kate has worked as a human ethics officer in the Research Portfolio at The University of Sydney since 2015. She has a particular interest in human research ethics as it applies to social media research and research in the mental health field.
Alan Hales
Alan Hales holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Newcastle and a Master of Management from Macquarie University. After joining the University of Newcastle Research Division Alan held various research administration roles before securing the Manager, Research Compliance, Integrity and Policy position. In this role Alan was responsible for human and animal ethics processes and was a senior advisor to the Human Research Ethics Committee and Animal Care and Ethics Committee for over ten years. Alan joined the University of Sydney as the Human Ethics Manager in 2021 and is the Chair of the HREC Executive while working closely with the University’s three human research ethics committees.
Marian-Andrei Rizoiu
Dr Marian-Andrei Rizoiu is a Senior Lecturer in Behavioral Data Science at the University of Technology Sydney. He is interested in stochastic behavioural modelling of human actions online, at the intersection of applied statistics, artificial intelligence and social data science. He leads the Behavioral Data Science lab, which studies human attention dynamics in the online environment, the emergence of influence and opinion polarisation. Marian-Andrei’s research has been funded by Facebook Research and Defence Science and Technology (DST). His work has appeared in the PNAS, PLOS ONE, PLOS Computations Biology, WWW, NeurIPS, IJCAI, and CIKM.
Claire Mason
Dr Claire Mason is a Principal Research Scientist at CSIRO's Data61. Her applied research supports agility and resilience in the Australian workforce by capturing novel sources of data about the changing labour market which inform the choices of job seekers, educators and employment services providers. Claire's research has been covered by mainstream media outlets such as the ABC's 7:30 Report, The Australian, The Financial Review and The Conversation and published in scientific journals such as the Journal of Applied Psychology, PLOS One, Leadership Quarterly, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Journal of Occupational Health Psychology and Small Group Research.
Caron Chen
Dr Haohui “Caron” Chen is a computational social scientist working for CSIRO's Data61. His multidisciplinary background including GIS, remote sensing, machine learning and statistical modelling allows him to build computational models to solve real-world problems at scale. In the early stage of his research career, Caron focused on disaster management, where he analysed 9.7 million geo-tagged tweets and found social media activities geographically correlated with reported damage during Hurricane Sandy. In the past four years, he has been obsessed with the future of work study. He and his colleagues created the Data61 Australian Skills Dashboard: skills.csiro.au
Andrew Reeson
Dr Andrew Reeson is a Research Team Leader at CSIRO’s Data61. In his research, he applies behavioural science with econometric modelling to address issues of national significance to Australia. After a mis-spent youth taking biology at Oxford he switched to economics in order to focus on some of the more challenging aspects of real-world problems. In recent years he has shifted his focus to the digital economy, including modelling the potential impact of technology on employment and future skills demand. He is also researching how digital platforms should be designed and implemented to support efficient and equitable data sharing.
Simon Musgrave
Dr Simon Musgrave was a member of the linguistics program at Monash University from 2003 until 2020. His research interests included the use of computational tools in linguistic research and the relationship between linguistics and digital humanities. He was involved in the Australian National Corpus project, an important piece of digital research infrastructure, and has been a member of the executive of the Australasian Association for Digital Humanities since 2015. Simon currently is part of the team delivering various language-related infrastructures including the Australian Text Analytics Platform and the Language Data Commons of Australia.
Daniel Angus
Daniel Angus is a Professor of Digital Communication, leader of the QUT Digital Media Research Centre’s Computational Communication and Culture Program, and Chair of Infrastructure within the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making and Society. His research examines issues at the intersection of technology and society, with a focus on algorithms, misinformation, and new methods to study the digital society.
Suhem Parack
Suhem Parack is a Staff Developer Advocate for Academic Research at Twitter and helps students and researchers understand how to get Twitter data for their research.Teaching Assistants
Justin Miller - teaching assistant
Justin Miller is a PhD student at the University of Sydney. His area of interest is in natural language programming and its applications to social media. He has a Master of Data Science from Western Sydney University and has worked as a data scientist within the legal industry.
Jen Grinham - administrative assistant
Jen Grinham is a PhD student at the University of Sydney. Her research interests include data privacy, ethics, profiling, algorithmic bias, internet cultures, governance, digital media, and she is currently examining student data privacy risks created by educational technology companies.
Yori Insi Eriyanti - PR assistant
Yori Insi Eriyanti is in her last semester of Master of Strategic Public Relations at the University of Sydney. She found her passion in creating communication plans, brand strategies, social media communication and design. Currently, she is the Co-Director of the Media Department of the Indonesia-Australia Association.Participants
Linda Aulbach
Linda is a PhD fellow in Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University and holds an MA in Digital Humanities. She is focusing on Artificial Intelligence Ethics, exploring the implementation of such as well as discussing the concept of empathy within this scope. Her work in AI Ethics originated in Germany and she has recently worked with Australian AI organisations.
Uttama Barua
Uttama Barua is a PhD student in Built Environment at the UNSW. Before that, she was an Assistant Professor in Urban and Regional Planning at the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET), Dhaka, Bangladesh. Her broader research interest is planning for disaster risk reduction and management.
José-Miguel Bello Villarino
José-Miguel is a Research Fellow at the University of Sydney Law School and the Institutions programme of the ADM+S Centre of Excellence. His current research focuses on regulatory approaches to artificial intelligence, especially on how to deal with risks derived from the operation of AI systems from a comparative approach.
Tayla Broadbridge
Tayla is a joint-PhD candidate in mathematics at the University of Adelaide and the University of Nottingham. Her research explores the presence and development of food deserts using agent-based modelling and data science approaches, with the goal of developing more effective interventions. Tayla received her honours degree in applied mathematics from the University of Adelaide.
Mahli-Ann Butt
Dr Mahli-Ann Butt is the Sydney Games and Play Lab’s research chair, a research assistant on the 'Emerging online safety issues' project funded by the eSaftey Commission, and serves on the board of the DiGRA and DiGRA Australia. Her research investigates embodied precarity and how videogames intersect with everyday life.
Simon Chambers
Simon Chambers is a postdoctoral research fellow at The MARCS Institute, Western Sydney University. His research draws on mixed methods approaches to investigate the dynamics of cultural fields. He is particularly interested in the application of social network analysis techniques to model the evolution of musical styles.
Jean Linis-Dinco
Jean Linis-Dinco is a PhD candidate in Cybersecurity at UNSW-Canberra. Her work examines how propaganda travels from the state to the people online in the context of the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar. Methodologically, Jean uses computational social science approaches particularly Natural Language Processing to analyse and predict social conflicts. Jean's work has focused on the intersection between human rights and technology. As part of this work, Jean has been regarded as one of the top 100 women in AI Ethics by the Women in AI Ethics.
George Gyamfi
George is a PhD candidate in the School of Languages and Cultures at The University of Queensland. I aim to apply theories and concepts from the field of education, combined with insights from online learning to make practical contributions to teaching, learning and research in higher education.
Qihang Jiang
Qihang Jiang is a Ph.D. student, a research assistant (T2, 2022) and a casual academic (LING5003 Language Technology, T3, 2021 & 2022) from School of Humanities & Languages, Faculty of Arts, Design & Architecture, University of New South Wales. His main research interests centre on corpus-based translation studies, audiovisual translation, fansubbing, eye-tracking study, reception study.
Kateryna Kasianenko
Kateryna is a PhD Student at Queensland University of Technology’s Digital Media Research Centre studying transnational digital publics using computational and qualitative methods. She researched the reception of the war in Ukraine and the MeToo movement in Japan, and previously worked in the news media and software industries.
Wynston Lee
Wynston Lee is a PhD candidate at RMIT’s School of Media and Communication within Haiqing Yu's ARC Future Fellowship Project on The Social Credit System and Everyday Life in China. His PhD dissertation takes a political economy and Science and Technology Studies approach to analysing China's Social Credit System.
Cathy Xuanchi Liu
Cathy completed her Bachelor of Statistics Honours and continues her academic career as a PhD candidate in Discipline of Complex Systems of the University of Sydney Science School. Her main area of interest is community structure in social media and topic modelling.
Bogdan Mamaev
Bogdan is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Griffith University's School of Government and International Relations. His research examines how political regimes, repression, and electoral manipulation impact claims-making, social movements, and contentious politics. His interests include the use of computational techniques to understand contention in restrictive political settings.
Shima Saniei
Shima Saniei is a PhD candidate and casual academic in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Shima's research draws on the communication and public relations literature to examine activist groups' narratives and social networks. Shima is interested in using CSS to explore narratives and networks in online communities.
Premeet Sidhu
Premeet Sidhu is a PhD student at The University of Sydney. Her PhD explores the modern resurgence and appeal of the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons [D&D]. Her current research interests include investigating how meaningful player experiences in games can be applied and considered in education and media.
Elena Sheard
Elena Sheard is a PhD student with the Sydney Speaks Project at the Australian National University. Her research focuses on predicting language change over individuals’ lifespans, using quantitative analysis of longitudinal data from the 1970s and 2010s. She completed her Bachelor (Linguistics and Italian Studies) and Honours (Linguistics) Degrees at the University of Sydney.
Ryan Stanton
Ryan Stanton is a PhD Student at the University of Sydney whose research focuses on analysing gaming podcasts as an example of new media production. His research interests cross a broad variety of new media and digital cultures including gaming content creation, platform studies, production studies, and more.
Guangnan Zhu
Guangnan Zhu holds a BE degree with honours in advanced computing and a Master of computing at ANU and is doing his PhD in QUT. His research focuses on the development and application of computational methods and machine learning techniques in communication and digital media, especially in detecting and analysing online disinformation and misinformation. His PhD project focuses on the detection of coordinated inauthentic behaviour using multimodal data.