MAPSS

http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html

Title: Statistical Analysis of Online News

Speaker: Laurent El Ghaoui, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, University of California, Berkeley
4:15 - 5:15 pm, Packard 101
Thursday, Nov 29, 2007
(Refreshments after the talk)

Abstract :

Each day we are inundated with an avalanche of online news. Yet is is currently hard to obtain a global view of this information. What are the images that various news media project about specific topics, such as global warming, human rights or presidential candidates? How do these images evolve over time? How do they differ across different media sources, scientific or mainstream? What are the dynamics of news events across news networks?

Modern statistical learning and optimization methods are having a great impact in fields where large amounts of data have become recently available, such as biology or finance. With no doubt, such methods can help shed light on the issues above as well, to the benefit of the social scientist or the ordinary citizen. In turn, online news analysis pushes the boundaries of statistics and optimization towards databases, networks, visualization, and calls for a renewed interaction between computer engineering and social sciences.

I will describe a project which aims at providing user-friendly tools for analyzing large amounts of text data residing in online databases, with a focus on online news data and voting records. I will discuss in particular how online learning and sparsity-inducing methods arise as key ingredients, and I will delineate some related fundamental challenges.

Biography

Laurent El Ghaoui graduated from Ecole Polytechnique (Palaiseau, France) in 1985, and obtained his PhD in Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University in March 1990. He was a faculty member of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Techniques Avancées (Paris, France) from 1992 until 1999, and held part-time teaching appointments at Ecole Polytechnique within the Applied Mathematics department and Université de Paris-I (La Sorbonne) in the Mathematics in Economy program. In 1998, he was awarded the Bronze Medal for Engineering Sciences, from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France. He joined the Berkeley faculty in April 1999 as an Acting Associate Professor, and obtained his tenure in May 2001. He went on leave from UC between July 2003 and September 2006 to work for SAC Capital Management, a hedge fund based in New York and Connecticut.
Presentation Slides (pdf)