Taha Yasseri

Last updated

Taha Yasseri
Taha Yasseri.jpg
Born
Taha Yasseri

(1984-09-06) 6 September 1984 (age 40)
Nationality British
Alma mater Sharif University of Technology (MSc) [1]
University of Göttingen (PhD)
AwardsLaureate Award, IRC, 2022.
W. J. M. Mackenzie Book Prize, Political Studies Association, 2017.
Scientific career
Fields Complex systems
Computational social science
Network science
Social data science
Human dynamics [2]
Institutions University of Oxford
Oxford Internet Institute
Alan Turing Institute
Thesis Nanoscale pattern formation on ion-sputtered surfaces  (2010)
Doctoral advisor Reiner Kree [3]
Website tahayasseri.com

Taha Yasseri (born 6 September 1984) is a physicist and sociologist known for his research on crowdsourcing, collective intelligence and computational social science. [2] He is a Full professor at the School of Social Sciences and Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. He is the inaugural Workday Chair of Technology and Society. [4] He was formerly a professor of sociology at University College Dublin, a senior research fellow in computational social science at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), University of Oxford, a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute for data science and artificial intelligence, and a research fellow in humanities and social sciences at Wolfson College, Oxford. Yasseri is one of the leading scholars in computational social science and his research has been widely covered in mainstream media. [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] Yasseri obtained his PhD in theoretical physics of complex systems at the age of 25 from the University of Göttingen, Germany.

Contents

Education

Yasseri was educated at Sharif University of Technology [1] and the University of Göttingen where he was awarded a PhD in physics for research supervised by Reiner Kree  [ Wikidata ]. [11]

Research and career

Yasseri's research investigates complex systems, computational social science, [12] network science, [13] social data science and human dynamics. [2] [14] [15]

Wikipedia

Yasseri has studied the statistical trends of systemic bias at Wikipedia introduced by editing conflicts and their resolution. [16] His research examined the counterproductive work behavior of edit warring. Yasseri contended that simple reverts or "undo" operations were not the most significant measure of counterproductive behavior at Wikipedia and relied instead on the statistical measurement of detecting "reverting/reverted pairs" or "mutually reverting edit pairs". Such a "mutually reverting edit pair" is defined where one editor reverts the edit of another editor who then, in sequence, returns to revert the first editor. The results were tabulated for several language versions of Wikipedia. The English Wikipedia's three largest conflict rates belonged to the articles George W. Bush, Anarchism and Muhammad. By comparison, for the German Wikipedia, the three largest conflict rates at the time of the study were for the articles covering Croatia, Scientology and 9/11 conspiracy theories. [17]

In a study published by PLoS ONE in 2012 he estimated the share of contributions to different editions of Wikipedia from different regions of the world. It reported that the proportion of the edits made from North America was 51% for the English Wikipedia, and 25% for the simple English Wikipedia. [18] The Wikimedia Foundation hoped to increase the number of editors in the Global South to 37% by 2015.[ citation needed ]

Machine sociology and bots conflict

In a 2017 article titled "Even Good Bots Fight", [19] Yasseri and his colleagues studied interactions between Wikipedia bots. Their work illustrating the unpredictable and somewhat surprising social interactions between bots, ignited a discussion on the topic of machine sociology and the human-like behaviour of systems of semi-autonomous agents such as Wikipedia bots. [20] Yasseri argues that even simple and predictable bots with a common goal and design might show unpredictable emergent behaviour when deployed at mass scale. [21]

Social media and politics

Yasseri has studied the role of social media in politics. He has used Wikipedia page view statistics and Google search volumes to understand and potentially predict electoral popularity in different countries. [22] He has co-written Political Turbulence; How Social Media Shape Collective Action [23] [24] which was selected among the best politics books of 2016 by The Guardian [25] and was awarded the Political Studies Association book of the year award. [26]

TEDx

Yasseri is a TEDx Thessaloniki 2019 speaker. [27]

Related Research Articles

In social science and economics, corporate capitalism is a capitalist marketplace characterized by the dominance of hierarchical and bureaucratic corporations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oxford Internet Institute</span> Research institute at the University of Oxford

The Oxford Internet Institute (OII) serves as a hub for interdisciplinary research, combining social and computer science to explore information, communication, and technology. It is an integral part of the University of Oxford's Social Sciences Division in England.

In web analytics and website management, a pageview or page view, abbreviated in business to PV and occasionally called page impression, is a request to load a single HTML file of an Internet site. On the World Wide Web, a page request would result from a web surfer clicking on a link on another page pointing to the page in question.

Citation impact or citation rate is a measure of how many times an academic journal article or book or author is cited by other articles, books or authors. Citation counts are interpreted as measures of the impact or influence of academic work and have given rise to the field of bibliometrics or scientometrics, specializing in the study of patterns of academic impact through citation analysis. The importance of journals can be measured by the average citation rate, the ratio of number of citations to number articles published within a given time period and in a given index, such as the journal impact factor or the citescore. It is used by academic institutions in decisions about academic tenure, promotion and hiring, and hence also used by authors in deciding which journal to publish in. Citation-like measures are also used in other fields that do ranking, such as Google's PageRank algorithm, software metrics, college and university rankings, and business performance indicators.

PLOS Computational Biology is a monthly peer-reviewed open access scientific journal covering computational biology. It was established in 2005 by the Public Library of Science in association with the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) in the same format as the previously established PLOS Biology and PLOS Medicine. The founding editor-in-chief was Philip Bourne and the current ones are Feilim Mac Gabhann and Jason Papin.

Wikipedia has been studied extensively. Between 2001 and 2010, researchers published at least 1,746 peer-reviewed articles about the online encyclopedia. Such studies are greatly facilitated by the fact that Wikipedia's database can be downloaded without help from the site owner.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">WikiPathways</span>

WikiPathways is a community resource for contributing and maintaining content dedicated to biological pathways. Any registered WikiPathways user can contribute, and anybody can become a registered user. Contributions are monitored by a group of admins, but the bulk of peer review, editorial curation, and maintenance is the responsibility of the user community. WikiPathways is originally built using MediaWiki software, a custom graphical pathway editing tool (PathVisio) and integrated BridgeDb databases covering major gene, protein, and metabolite systems. WikiPathways was founded in 2008 by Thomas Kelder, Alex Pico, Martijn Van Iersel, Kristina Hanspers, Bruce Conklin and Chris Evelo. Current architects are Alex Pico and Martina Summer-Kutmon.

Culturomics is a form of computational lexicology that studies human behavior and cultural trends through the quantitative analysis of digitized texts. Researchers data mine large digital archives to investigate cultural phenomena reflected in language and word usage. The term is an American neologism first described in a 2010 Science article called Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books, co-authored by Harvard researchers Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden.

Computational social science is an interdisciplinary academic sub-field concerned with computational approaches to the social sciences. This means that computers are used to model, simulate, and analyze social phenomena. It has been applied in areas such as computational economics, computational sociology, computational media analysis, cliodynamics, culturomics, nonprofit studies. It focuses on investigating social and behavioral relationships and interactions using data science approaches, network analysis, social simulation and studies using interactive systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Filippo Menczer</span> American and Italian computer scientist

Filippo Menczer is an American and Italian academic. He is a University Distinguished Professor and the Luddy Professor of Informatics and Computer Science at the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, Indiana University. Menczer is the Director of the Observatory on Social Media, a research center where data scientists and journalists study the role of media and technology in society and build tools to analyze and counter disinformation and manipulation on social media. Menczer holds courtesy appointments in Cognitive Science and Physics, is a founding member and advisory council member of the IU Network Science Institute, a former director the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, a senior research fellow of the Kinsey Institute, a fellow of the Center for Computer-Mediated Communication, and a former fellow of the Institute for Scientific Interchange in Turin, Italy. In 2020 he was named a Fellow of the ACM.

WikiWarMonitor is a website dedicated to resolving Wikipedia edit wars. It is operated by a group of researchers from Oxford Internet Institute, Rutgers University, and Central European University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Budapest Reference Connectome</span>

The Budapest Reference Connectome server computes the frequently appearing anatomical brain connections of 418 healthy subjects. It has been prepared from diffusion MRI datasets of the Human Connectome Project into a reference connectome, which can be downloaded in CSV and GraphML formats and visualized on the site in 3D.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Helen Margetts</span> Political scientist, University of Oxford

Helen Zerlina Margetts, is Professor of Internet and Society at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), University of Oxford and from 2011 to 2018 was Director of the OII. She is currently Director of the Public Policy Programme at The Alan Turing Institute. She is a political scientist specialising in digital era governance and politics, and has published over a hundred books, journal articles and research reports in this field.

Direct coupling analysis or DCA is an umbrella term comprising several methods for analyzing sequence data in computational biology. The common idea of these methods is to use statistical modeling to quantify the strength of the direct relationship between two positions of a biological sequence, excluding effects from other positions. This contrasts usual measures of correlation, which can be large even if there is no direct relationship between the positions. Such a direct relationship can for example be the evolutionary pressure for two positions to maintain mutual compatibility in the biomolecular structure of the sequence, leading to molecular coevolution between the two positions.

Science information on Wikipedia includes the information that Wikipedia presents about science. There have been critiques of and discussions about the impact and quality of that information, and of the interactions of Wikipedia editors, scientists, and public engagement with the information.

Durai Sundar is an Indian computational biologist, bioinformatician and the current Head of the Department of Biochemical Engineering and Biotechnology at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. He is known for his studies in the fields of genome editing tool designing, biological studies of natural drugs and metabolic engineering as well as for his participation in the Indo-Japanese collaborative research initiatives on anti-cancer drug development and is a life member of the National Academy of Sciences, India.

Ideological bias on Wikipedia, especially in its English-language edition, has been the subject of academic analysis and public criticism of the project. Questions relate to whether its content is biased due to the political, religious, or other ideologies its volunteer editors may adhere to. These all draw concerns as to the possible effects this may have on the encyclopedia's reliability.

Statcheck is an R package designed to detect statistical errors in peer-reviewed psychology articles by searching papers for statistical results, redoing the calculations described in each paper, and comparing the two values to see if they match. It takes advantage of the fact that psychological research papers tend to report their results in accordance with the guidelines published by the American Psychological Association (APA). This leads to several disadvantages: it can only detect results reported completely and in exact accordance with the APA's guidelines, and it cannot detect statistics that are only included in tables in the paper. Another limitation is that Statcheck cannot deal with statistical corrections to test statistics, like Greenhouse–Geisser or Bonferroni corrections, which actually make tests more conservative. Some journals have begun piloting Statcheck as part of their peer review process. Statcheck is free software published under the GNU GPL v3.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ganesh Bagler</span> Indian biologist (born 1977)

Ganesh Bagler is known for his research in computational gastronomy, an emerging data science of food, flavors and health. By blending food with data and computation he has helped establish the foundations of this niche area. Starting with the investigation of food pairing in the Indian cuisine, his lab has contributed to computational gastronomy with studies on culinary fingerprints of world cuisines, culinary evolution, benevolent health impacts of spices, and taste prediction algorithms.

Sherry Towers is an American and Canadian statistician and data scientist working as an independent consultant and an affiliate scholar with the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Potsdam, Germany following a seven year position as a faculty research associate at Arizona State University. Towers is perhaps best known for her study of the contagion effect of mass shootings. She is also the founder and owner of Towers Consulting LLC, a consulting company that provides visual analytics, data mining, applied statistics, and computational modeling services to industry, academia, and the public sectors.

References

  1. 1 2 Taha Yasseri's ORCID   0000-0002-1800-6094
  2. 1 2 3 Taha Yasseri publications indexed by Google Scholar OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
  3. Hartmann, Alexander K; Kree, Reiner; Yasseri, Taha (2009). "Simulating discrete models of pattern formation by ion beam sputtering". Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter. 21 (22): 224015. Bibcode:2009JPCM...21v4015H. doi:10.1088/0953-8984/21/22/224015. ISSN   0953-8984. PMID   21715753. S2CID   27445208.
  4. https://www.tcd.ie/news_events/articles/2024/taha-yasseri-named-inaugural-workday-professor-for-technology-and-society-at-trinity-and-tu-dublin--/
  5. "These Computer Scientists Are Making a 'Global Map of Sexism'". Motherboard. 9 October 2015. Retrieved 25 March 2018.
  6. Sample, Ian (23 February 2017). "Study reveals bot-on-bot editing wars raging on Wikipedia's pages". The Guardian . Retrieved 25 March 2018.
  7. Price, Michael (11 October 2016). "We care when an airplane crashes. And then we don't". Science. doi:10.1126/science.aal0248.
  8. Pearson, Jordan (15 July 2016). "Research Confirms Dating Apps Are a Sad Game". Vice. Retrieved 1 June 2018.
  9. Pappas, Stephanie (5 April 2017). "How Long Do We Remember Major Plane Crashes?". Live Science.
  10. Wachs, Johannes; Yasseri, Taha; Lengyel, Balázs; Kertész, János (2019). "Social capital predicts corruption risk in towns". Royal Society Open Science. 6 (4): 182103. arXiv: 1810.05485 . Bibcode:2019RSOS....682103W. doi:10.1098/rsos.182103. ISSN   2054-5703. PMC   6502378 . PMID   31183137. Open Access logo PLoS transparent.svg
  11. Yasseri, Taha (2010). Nanoscale pattern formation on ion-sputtered surfaces. uni-goettingen.de (PhD thesis). University of Göttingen. OCLC   837961471. Lock-green.svg
  12. Ciampaglia, Giovanni Luca; Mashhadi, Afra; Yasseri, Taha (2017). Social Informatics. Springer. ISBN   9783319672168.
  13. Mestyán, Márton; Yasseri, Taha; Kertész, János (2013). "Early Prediction of Movie Box Office Success Based on Wikipedia Activity Big Data". PLOS ONE. 8 (8): e71226. arXiv: 1211.0970 . Bibcode:2013PLoSO...871226M. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0071226 . ISSN   1932-6203. PMC   3749192 . PMID   23990938.
  14. Samoilenko, Anna; Yasseri, Taha (2014). "The distorted mirror of Wikipedia: a quantitative analysis of Wikipedia coverage of academics". EPJ Data Science. 3 (1). Springer Publishing. arXiv: 1310.8508 . doi:10.1140/epjds20. S2CID   4971771. Open Access logo PLoS transparent.svg
  15. Schellekensa, Menno H.; Holstegeb, Floris; Yasseria, Taha (2019). "Female scholars need to achieve more for equal public recognition". arXiv: 1904.06310 .{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  16. Szolnoki, Attila; Yasseri, Taha; Sumi, Robert; Rung, András; Kornai, András; Kertész, János (2012). "Dynamics of Conflicts in Wikipedia". PLOS ONE. 7 (6): e38869. arXiv: 1202.3643 . Bibcode:2012PLoSO...738869Y. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0038869 . ISSN   1932-6203. PMC   3380063 . PMID   22745683.
  17. Yasseri, Taha; Spoerri, Anselm; Graham, Mark; Kertesz, Janos (2013). "The Most Controversial Topics in Wikipedia: A Multilingual and Geographical Analysis". Rochester, NY. arXiv: 1305.5566 . doi:10.2139/ssrn.2269392. S2CID   12133330. SSRN   2269392.{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  18. Yasseri, Taha; Sumi, Robert; Kertész, János (2012). "Circadian Patterns of Wikipedia Editorial Activity: A Demographic Analysis". PLOS ONE. 7 (1): e30091. arXiv: 1109.1746 . Bibcode:2012PLoSO...730091Y. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0030091 . ISSN   1932-6203. PMC   3260192 . PMID   22272279.
  19. Tsvetkova, Milena; García-Gavilanes, Ruth; Floridi, Luciano; Yasseri, Taha (2017). "Even good bots fight: The case of Wikipedia". PLOS ONE. 12 (2): e0171774. arXiv: 1609.04285 . Bibcode:2017PLoSO..1271774T. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0171774 . PMC   5322977 . PMID   28231323.
  20. Simon, Matt. "Internet Bots Fight Each Other Because They're All Too Human". Wired via www.wired.com.
  21. Yasseri, Taha (25 August 2017). "Never mind killer robots – even the good ones are scarily unpredictable". The Conversation.
  22. Bohannon, John (2017). "Election polling is in trouble. Can internet data save it?". Science. doi:10.1126/science.aal0695.
  23. Margetts, Helen; John, Peter; Hale, Scott A.; Yasseri, Taha (2016). Political turbulence: how social media shape collective action. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. ISBN   9780691159225.
  24. "Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action, by Helen Margetts, Peter John, Scott Hale and Taha Yasseri". Times Higher Education (THE). 21 January 2016.
  25. Hinsliff, Gaby (1 November 2016). "The best politics books of 2016". The Guardian . Retrieved 18 May 2018.
  26. OII (5 December 2017). "Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action awarded the Political Studies Association book prize". Oxford Internet Institute. Retrieved 18 May 2018.
  27. Anon (2019). "Dr Taha Yasseri: TEDxThessaloniki". tedxthessaloniki.com.