Social Data Doing Social Good

This will be ranked as one of the top meetups of the year - we have some outstanding speakers that we are fortunate enough to host.

"Using Social Data to Better Understand Emotional Crisis and Suicide"

Glen Coppersmith, Qntfy, @GlenCoppersmith (https://twitter.com/glencoppersmith)

Glen will talk about what Qntfy is using data outside the healthcare system to detect and better understand emotional crisis and suicide (which claimed more American lives last year than automobile accidents or homicides). He will also share a broader context and vision of how the "digital life" we lead (social media, wearables, devices, etc.) provides for a coming revolution in behavioral health.

Glen is the founder & CEO of Qntfy, a company using analytics to empower patients, loved ones, and clinicians. Glen was previously at Johns Hopkins, and considers himself a recovering academic -- still publishing papers, but primarily working to integrate novel technology into complex human systems of care.

"Quantifying a community's worldview and detecting the early signs of extremism in Social Data"

Jonathon Morgan, Founder/CEO New Knowledge, co-host of @PartiallyD, @JonathonMorgan (https://twitter.com/jonathonmorgan)

Using deep learning, we can analyze the context in which online communities use language about politics, hate speech, and extremism. By comparing theses context to mainstream language, it's possible to quantify a community's worldview, measure its partisanship, and detect the early signs of extremism. We'll look at how these techniques reveal rising radicalization on the far right, and even where Clinton and Trump supporters might share common values.

Jonathon is the founder and CEO of New Knowledge, a company building technologies to research, explain, and predict human behavior. As part of his ongoing work applying quantitative methods to combating terrorism and violent extremism, he served as an advisor to the White House and State Department, co-authored the ISIS Twitter Census for the Brookings Institution, and develops new technology with DARPA, along with Qntfy. Jonathon's recent research into the online behavior of far-right extremist groups has been featured by the Washington Post, The Atlantic, and the Southern Poverty Law Center. In his spare time, he co-hosts Partially Derivative, the surprisingly popular podcast about data science and drinking.