Munmun De Choudhury

Title:

Opportunities of Social Media in Health and Wellbeing

Abstract:

People are increasingly using social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, to share their thoughts and opinions with their contacts. Consequently, there has been a corresponding surge of interest in utilizing continuing streams of evidence from social media on posting activity to reflect on people’s psyches and social milieus. In this talk, I will discuss how the ubiquitous use of social media as well as the abundance and growing repository of such data bears potential to provide a new type of “lens” for inferring health related behaviors and mechanisms. Specifically, I will discuss the harnessing of social media in examining patterns of activity, emotional, and linguistic correlates for childbirth and postnatal course in new mothers, and how online social tools provide a conducive platform of support to vulnerable populations. Finally, I will also discuss clinical and design implications, as well as our social and ethical responsibilities around interpretation and automatic inference of health states of people from their online social footprints.

Bio:

Munmun De Choudhury is currently an assistant professor at the School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Tech and a faculty associate with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. Munmun’s research interests are in computational social science. She builds and applies computational methods to large-scale online social data to understand and reason about people’s behavior and well-being. Munmun’s research has won several awards, including a best paper and honorable mention awards from ACM SIGCHI, as well as has been extensively covered in popular press. Previously, Munmun was a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research, and obtained her PhD from Arizona State University in 2011.