Month: March 2017

CL Seminar Series March 3: Dr. Sravana Reddy

Obfuscating Gender in Social Media Writing
Sravana Reddy
Researcher, Wellesley College
Friday March 3, 3:15 in Volen 101
The vast availability of textual data on social media has led to an interest in algorithms to automatically predict demographic attributes based on the user’s writing. These methods are valuable for social science research as well as targeted advertising and profiling, but also compromise the privacy of users who may not realize that their personal idiolects can give away their identities. Can we automatically modify a text so that the author is classified as a certain target gender, under limited knowledge of the classifier, while preserving the text’s fluency and meaning? In this talk, I present a model to modify a text, show empirical results with Twitter and Yelp data, and outline future directions.
Bio:
Sravana Reddy is a researcher at Wellesley College working on natural language processing and its intersections with privacy, the digital humanities, and sociolinguistics. She graduated with a PhD from the University of Chicago, and a bachelors’ from Brandeis University.

Brandeis CL spring “Meet’n’Greet” Industry Reception

The Brandeis Computational Linguistics program held its spring Industry Reception networking event.  Technical representatives from twelve companies attended and spent two hours talking with students about what they do in their companies and collected resumes from students looking for internships and jobs.  Alumni were among the representatives from Amazon, BBN, Basis, Burning Glass, and Callminer.  Other companies attending included Fidelity, Cobalt, ISI, SAP, Optum, SIFT, and Spotify.  Many of those companies also have interns or alumni from the program.

Check out descriptions of these and other companies that have attended our receptions in the past in the Industry Catalog.  The reception is held every semester, with generally 12-15 companies attending each time.

Information Sciences Institute

The Information Sciences Institute (ISI) is a world leader in research and development of advanced information processing, computer and communications technologies. A unit of
the University of Southern California’s highly ranked Viterbi School of Engineering, ISI is one of the nation’s largest, most successful university- affiliated computer research institutes. Our work ranges from theoretical basic research, such as core engineering and computer science discovery, to applied research and development, such as design and modeling of innovative prototypes and devices. ISI’s focus areas include natural language, machine translation and information integration. ISI is based in Marina del Rey, California, and maintains offices in Arlington, Virginia and Waltham, Massachusetts.