
Introspective Users and Introspective Text: Some Recent Results
Speaker: Shomir Wilson, Project Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University
Thursday, Mar 24, 2016 – 11:00am – 12:00pm – Engineering Building, Room 3507
Abstract:
I will present results from my work on two topics. The first is usable privacy. Effectively communicating privacy choices and consequences to internet users is a persistent challenge, as their privacy preferences are complex and diverse. I will discuss two studies on privacy in online social networks, and I will present findings from the Usable Privacy Policy Project, a multidisciplinary effort to use crowdsourcing and natural language processing to help internet users understand online privacy practices. The second topic involves entity linking, a subtopic in natural language processing. Writing to inform frequently contains references to illustrations, sections, lists, examples, arguments, and other communicative artifacts within a document. I will present some results on work toward identifying references to such artifacts. Potential applications include automatic artifact tagging (in the same sense as tagging images with descriptive text), enhancement of online discussion forums, and document layout generation.
Bio:
Shomir Wilson is a Project Scientist at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science. He has previously been a NSF International Research Fellow, a Postdoctoral Fellow, and a Lecturer at the same university, and he has also been an NSF International Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom. His interests span pure and applied research in usable privacy, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland in 2011.