[Colloquium] TODAY: Michael Cafarella (Michigan) - "Data Intensive Systems for the Social Sciences"

[Rob Mitchum]

*Michael Cafarella*
*Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering*
*University of Michigan*

*Data-Intensive Systems for the Social Sciences*

*Friday, May 3, 2019 @ 12:00pm*
*John Crerar Library <https://goo.gl/maps/5h7saQhVerqW8gYA9>, Room 390*
*Lunch Provided*

*Abstract:*
The social sciences are crucial for deciding billions in spending, and yet
are often starved for data and badly underserved by modern computational
tools. Building data-intensive systems for social science workloads holds
the promise of enabling exciting discoveries in both computational and
domain-specific fields, while also making an outsized real-world impact.

This talk will describe two data systems for the social sciences. The first
is RaccoonDB, a declarative nowcasting data management system, which
enables users to predict real-world time-series phenomena from social media
signals. RaccoonDB’s novel query optimization methods allow it to generate
useful social science predictions 123 times faster than competing systems,
using just 10% of the computational resources. When applied to unemployment
phenomena, the system yields predictions with accuracy that is comparable
to predictions from real-world economists.

The second system is an information extraction system designed to analyze
online text and help law enforcement officers identify potential human
trafficking victims. This system has been successfully applied to
real-world cases. In addition, the resulting extracted dataset enables
several novel social science findings about behavior in an illicit and
often opaque market.

*Bio:*
Michael Cafarella is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and
Engineering at the University of Michigan. His research interests include
databases, information extraction, data integration, and data mining. He
has published extensively in venues such as SIGMOD, VLDB, and elsewhere.
Mike received his PhD from the University of Washington in 2009 with
advisors Oren Etzioni and Dan Suciu. His academic awards include the NSF
CAREER award, the Sloan Research Fellowship, and the VLDB Test of Time
Award. In addition to his academic work, Mike cofounded (with Doug Cutting)
the Hadoop open-source project. In 2015 he cofounded (with Chris Re and
Feng Niu) Lattice Data, Inc., which is now part of Apple.



-- 
*Rob Mitchum*

*Associate Director of Communications for Data Science and Computing*
*University of Chicago*
*rmitchum at uchicago.edu <rmitchum at ci.uchicago.edu>*
*773-484-9890*
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