Visiting Research Seminar: Pranav Goel - Understanding the Online Information Ecosystem using Observatory-based Data Collection

Join us for an engaging talk by Dr. Pranav Goel from Northeastern University, organised by the Doctoral Guild.

Title: Understanding the Online Information Ecosystem using Observatory-based Data Collection

Abstract: Individuals increasingly spend a significant portion of their lives online, and the Internet serves as a primary medium for obtaining and disseminating information. However, virtually none of this data on online behavior is available for academic research, or is siloed, proprietary, with problematic scientific foundations, and often collected in ways that are on ethically shaky grounds. In this talk, I introduce the National Internet Observatory: an open, large-scale, secure, and privacy-preserving observatory of online behavior to enable academic research without relying on bespoke data collection, proprietary sources, or partnerships with industry. I then discuss concrete ongoing research with data collected through this observatory, on studying the role of different platforms in segregated news consumption as well as the impact of generative AI services on the health of the open web. I highlight how an observatory of online behavior can help us conduct cross-platform analysis as well as study the content people are exposed to, which is a much more salient experience of online content than the content production data provided by platform APIs.

Speaker Bio: Dr. Pranav Goel is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Northeastern University’s Network Science Institute, working with Dr. David Lazer. He completed his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Maryland. His research interests broadly span computational social science, particularly using web and text data as a potent digital trace of societal dynamics. He is currently interested in building a cross-platform understanding of online information consumption, investigating the impact of generative AI on information-seeking behavior, and the sociopolitical phenomenon of framing in news and social media. His work has been published in major computer science conferences such as NeurIPS, EMNLP, and ICWSM as well as journals with a broad audience, such as Nature Human Behaviour.

Website: https://pranav-goel.github.io/

1-to-1s:  https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1zDguss9Y0_hDN1h-Oq3BN-eUFja05647-6wp9YipmLM/edit?usp=sharing 

Zoom link: https://pitt.zoom.us/j/98146440806

Doctoral Guild at Pitt | Website | View More Events

Contact the organizers