Kristina Lerman
Kristina Lerman is a Project Leader at the Information Sciences Institute, a unit of the
University of Southern California (USC), and a Research Associate Professor in the USC
Viterbi School of Engineering’s Computer Science Department. An expert in social data
science, Dr. Lerman has received numerous grants from the National Science Foundation
(NSF), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Information
Sciences Institute (ISI) early in her career.
Her current work revolves around deciphering the structure and dynamics of online social
ecosystems on sites such as Twitter, Digg, Flickr and Delicious. Among her goals:
automatically organizing collective knowledge, discovering the structure of usergenerated communities, and predicting emerging trends and group behavior. Projects
explore network-based and machine learning-based approaches for modeling and
predicting individual and collective behavior.
Dr. Lerman’s research includes statistical text analysis, semantic modeling of data, and
mathematical modeling of multi-agents systems, as well as social networks and social
computing. She has published more than 70 journal articles, book chapters, and refereed
conference and workshop proceedings, and has received awards for her papers at the SBP
(2013) and ICWSM (2013) conferences. She holds a patent involving document-based
data extraction.
An active member of the social computing and Artificial Intelligence research
communities, Dr. Lerman has served as chair (SocInfo’14, SocialCom’14, Hypertext’13)
or senior PC (ICWSM, IJCAI) of leading conferences, and has organized several
computational social science workshops, including the 2016 IPAM Text and Culture
Analytics workshop; the 2014 IPAM workshop on Mathematics of Social Learning and
the 2008 AAAI Social Information Processing Symposium.
Dr. Lerman teaches a USC Computer Science Department course on social media
analysis. She briefly worked for a tech startup prior to joining ISI. Dr. Lerman was
awarded her Bachelor of Arts in Physics by Princeton University, and her Ph.D. in
physics by the University of California at Santa Barbara. She is an avid photographer
and, in her nearly nonexistent spare time, captures images of her own and other people’s
children.