Dr. Anna Farzindar

In recent years, online social networking has revolutionized interpersonal communication. The newer research on language analysis in social media has been increasingly focusing on the latter’s impact on our daily lives, both on a personal and a professional level. Natural language processing (NLP) is one of the most promising avenues for social media data processing. It is a scientific challenge to develop powerful methods and algorithms, which extract relevant information from a large volume of data coming from multiple sources and languages in various formats or in free forms. The content of this talk will be based on the recent book (2nd Edition), co-authored by Dr. Farzindar. She will give an introduction to Social Media Analysis, Linguistic processing and Semantic Analysis of Social Media Texts. She will explain more recent applications such as Digital Marketing and Healthcare applications.

Biography:

Dr. Anna (Atefeh) Farzindar is a research associate and Health Informatics advisor of the Data Science Institute (DSI) and a faculty member of the Department of Computer Science, Viterbi School of Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC). She was the CEO and co-founder of NLP Technologies Inc., a company specializing in Natural Language Processing (NLP), established in Montreal, Canada and was the Adjunct Professor at University of Montreal (2009-2015). She received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Montreal and her Master and Doctorate from Paris-Sorbonne University. Recently, she co-authored a book titled Natural Language Processing for Social Media, published by Morgan and Claypool publishers.She received Femmessor-Montréal awards, Succeeding with a balanced lifestyle, in the Innovative Technology and Information and Communications Technology category because of her involvement in the arts. Dr. Farzindar is a member of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Computer Science Liaison Committee and Member of the Canadian Advisory Committee of International Organization for Standardization (ISO). She has served as Industry Chair of Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association (2013-2015), Chair of the technology sector of the Language Industry Association Canada (AILIA) (2009-2013).