Munmun De Choudhury
Munmun.Dechoudhury@asu.edu
PhD Student/Research Assistant

• Academic Background

  I am a Computer Science PhD Student at the Arizona State University, Tempe (ASU) working with Dr Hari Sundaram. My broader research interests span the area of "computational social sciences". Specifically, I do computational and empirical analysis of communication dynamics in online social networks. My work is also closely intertwined with the broader research goal of the Reflective Living group at AME (Arts, Media & Engineering) wherein we seek to improve the human condition based on our experiences on variagated media. Earlier, I received a Bachelor of Technology (B. Tech) in Computer Science & Engineering from National Institute of Technology, Bhopal in Bhopal, India in 2005.

• Recent Updates

• 2009.08.30: Presented our paper on "Social Synchrony" at IEEE Conference on Social Computing 2009. Slides are here.

• 2009.07.02: Presented our paper on "Connecting Media to Community" at ICME 2009 (session - Social media and gaming).

• 2009.06.18: Visited Avaya Labs, Basking Ridge, NJ for an invited talk on our ASU-Avaya collaboration; and presented the work we have been doing over the past one year.

• 2009.05.18: Joined the Microeconomics and Social Systems group at Yahoo! Research, NY as a summer research intern under Duncan Watts.

• Research Interests

  What?
  My primary research focus revolves around tackling the challenges that have begun to emerge in the complex social dynamics observed in online interactions. This new area has begun to be known as "computational social sciences" and my research in particular encompasses computational modeling and empirical analysis of communication dynamics in online media-rich social networks. The goal of this research is firstly, to understand how human communication on online social media impacts large-scale sociological phenomenon, such as network growth, influence propagation and community evolution, and secondly, to study the connection of media creation and sharing with individuals and communities.
  
  Why?
  Social network dynamics can help personalizing search algorithms better to user needs and can also help determine interesting or authoritative people in organizations. At the macro-level, e.g. a corporation, this research can help in re-defining existing techniques of targeted advertising and enable mining collaborations and sentiments of communities with respect to external impulses. Broadly, analyzing the human communication process (on online social media) can also help understand ourselves better along with the semantics inherent in our daily lives as individuals and as collectives.
  
  How?
  I look at analysis of communication dynamics from three coupled facets:
  (a) communication and individuals (emergent local properties),
  (b) communication and online communities, networks (emergent global properties),
  (c) communication and rich media (properties of the shared media elements centered around emergent local and global properties).

• My research summary is here; also, downloadable as a slideshow here.
• Also here is my CV.
• Peer-reviewed Journal Articles / Book Chapters

• Lin, Y-R., Choudhury, M. D., Sundaram, H., Kelliher, A. (2010). Discovering Emergent Semantics and their Diffusion in Social Media. In International Journal of Multimedia Tools and Applications (MTAP), Special Issue on "Hot Research Topics in Multimedia", Springer, 2010, forthcoming.

• Choudhury, M. D., Sundaram, H., John, A., and Seligmann, D. D. (2010). Analyzing the Dynamics of Communication in Online Social Networks. In Handbook of Social Networks Technologies and Applications, 2010, Springer, forthcoming.

• Peer-reviewed Conference Proceedings

[DBLP] [Google Scholar] [ACM Digital Library]

• Choudhury, M. D., Sundaram, H., John, A., and Seligmann, D. D. (2009). Social Synchrony: Predicting Mimicry of User Actions in Online Social Media. Accepted to appear in Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Social Computing (Vancouver, Canada, August 29-31, 2009), SocialCom '09. (Acceptance rate: 9%)
  (pdf)(slides)

• Lin, Y-R., Sundaram, H., Choudhury, M. D., Kelliher, A. (2009). Temporal Patterns in Social Media Streams: Theme Discovery and Evolution using Joint Analysis of Content and Context. Accepted to appear in Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo (Cancun, Mexico, June 28- July 3, 2009). ICME '09 (Invited Paper).
  (pdf)(slides)

• Choudhury, M. D., Sundaram, H., Lin, Y-R., John, A., and Seligmann, D. D. (2009). Connecting Content to Community in Social Media via Image Content, User Tags and User Communication. Accepted to appear in Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo (Cancun, Mexico, June 28- July 3, 2009). ICME '09. (Acceptance rate: 22%)
  (pdf)(slides)

• Choudhury, M. D., Sundaram, H., John, A., and Seligmann, D. D. (2009). What Makes Conversations Interesting? Themes, Participants and Consequences of Conversations in Online Social Media. In Proceedings of the Eighteenth International World Wide Web Conference (Madrid, Spain, April 20-24, 2009). WWW '09. (Acceptance rate: 11%)
  (pdf)(slides)

• Choudhury, M. D., Sundaram, H., John, A., and Seligmann, D. D. (2008). Can Blog Communication Dynamics be correlated with Stock Market Activity? In Proceedings of the Nineteenth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, June 19 - 21, 2008). HT '08. (Acceptance rate: 25%)
  (pdf)(slides)

• Choudhury, M. D., Sundaram, H., John, A., and Seligmann, D. D. (2008). Dynamic Prediction of Communication Flow Using Social Context. In Proceedings of the Nineteenth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, June 19 - 21, 2008). HT '08. (Acceptance rate: 25%)
  (pdf)(slides)

• Choudhury, M. D., Sundaram, H., John, A., and Seligmann, D. D. (2007). Contextual Prediction of Communication Flow in Social Networks. In Proceedings of the IEEE/WIC/ACM international Conference on Web intelligence (Silicon Valley, California, USA, November 02 - 05, 2007). Web Intelligence. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, 57-65. (Acceptance rate: 17%)
  (pdf)(slides)

• Peer-reviewed Workshop Proceedings / Posters

• Choudhury, M. D. (2009). Modeling and Predicting Group Activity over Time in Online Social Media. Accepted to appear in Proceedings of the Twentieth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (Torino, Italy, June 29 - July 1, 2009). HT '09.
  (pdf)(poster)

• Choudhury, M. D., Sundaram, H., John, A., and Seligmann, D. D. (2008). Multi-scale Characteriation of Social Network Dynamics in the Blogosphere. In Proceedings of the Seventeenth ACM Conference on information and Knowledge Management (Napa Valley,California, USA, October 26-30, 2008). CIKM '08. ACM, New York, NY, 1515-1516. (Acceptance rate: 16%)
  (pdf)(poster)

• Choudhury, M. D., Sundaram, H., John, A., and Seligmann, D. D. (2008). Modeling Information Roles for Understanding Stock Market Dynamics. Eighth Annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference - Poster Session (Keystone,Colorado, USA, October 1-4, 2008). GHC '08.
  (pdf)(poster)

• Choudhury, M. D., Sundaram, H., John, A., and Seligmann, D. D. (2007). Context Aware Routing of Enterprise User Communications. In Proceedings of the Fifth IEEE international Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops (White Plains, New York, USA, March 19 - 23, 2007). PERCOMW. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, 39-44.
  (pdf)(slides)

• Publications under Review

• Choudhury, M. D., Mason, Winter A., Hofman, Jake M., Watts, Duncan J. Inferring Relevant Social Networks from Interpersonal Communication. Conference Submission.

• Choudhury, M. D., Feldman M., Amer-Yahia, S., Golbandi, N., Lempel, R., Yu, C. Constructing Travel Itineraries from Geo-temporal Bread-crumbs. Conference Submission.

• Choudhury, M. D., Sundaram, H., John, A., and Seligmann, D. D. Extraction, Characterization and Utility of Prototypical Communication Groups in the Blogosphere. Journal Submission.

• Publications under Preparation

• Choudhury, M. D., Sundaram, H., John, A., and Seligmann, D. D. Modeling Homophily-based Rates of Information Diffusion in Online Social Media along Multiple Social Dimensions. On-going work.

• Choudhury, M. D., Sundaram, H., John, A., and Seligmann, D. D. Predicting Efficient Communication Paths in Social Networks via Context Analysis. Journal paper.

• Choudhury, M. D., Sundaram, H., John, A., and Seligmann, D. D. Characterizing Social Media Elements via Dynamic Inference of their Interestingness. Journal paper.

• Thesis / Technical Reports

• Choudhury, M. D., John, A., Seligmann, D. D. and Sundaram, H. (2006). Inferring User Availability in Collaborations via Instant Messaging Activity. Avaya Technical Report, Avaya Labs Research. Summer '06. (pdf)

• Choudhury, M. D. (2005). Pattern Recognition in Satellite Imagery using Artificial Neural Networks. B.Tech (Bachelor of Technology) Thesis, National Institute of Technology, Bhopal, India.

• Talks

• Taking Research into Private Sphere: My Experiences at Yahoo! Research, Summer 2009. IEEE Computer Society, ASU, September 2009.(slides)

• Inferring Relevant Network Structures from Social Communication. Key Scientific Challenges Graduate Student Summit, Yahoo! Research, Sunnyvale, September 2009.

• Dynamics of Communication in Online Social Networks. Invited talk, Avaya Labs, Basking Ridge, NJ, June 2009. (slides)

• Characteristics of Conversations in Online Social Media. CSE PhD Forum Seminar, Arizona State University, April 2009.

• Inferring Availability of Enterprise Workers based on Instant Messaging Activity. Avaya Labs Intern Presentation, August 2006.

• Genetic Algorithm Approach for Fuzzy Controllers. Cognizance 2004, Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, March 2004.

• Remote Processes and Machine Control of Windows NT based systems (2000/XP). SPCTS 2003, IEEE Gujarat Section, September 2003.

• Awards and Honors

• Accepted to ACM Student Research Competition (SRC), Hypertext, 2009.

• Grace Hopper Scholarship Award 2007, 2008.

• Department Silver Medalist, NIT Bhopal, 2005.

• Jagadis Bose National Science Talent Search Scholarship, 2001.

• CSIR Programme on Youth for Leadership in Science Award (CPYLS), 1999.

• Top 1% in State Mathematical Olympiad, 1993, 1997, 1998.

• State Merit Scholarship, 1994.

• Online Presence:

  Facebook
  Twitter
  Orkut
  Flickr
  Blogger
  del.icio.us

• Hobbies:
  Writing, Poetry, Traveling, Photography and Cooking.