Expert Talk followed by socializing

This is the first Front Range NLP meetup in a good, long while. We will hear a talk from University of Colorado professor Chenhao Tan titled "Towards Understanding and Generating Language for Effective Social Interaction" (full description below). Then I would like us to get to know each other and brainstorm ideas for future meetups. So please come with enthusiasm and ideas!

Chenhao Tan is an assistant professor of computer science at University of Colorado Boulder. He obtained his PhD degree in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University and spent a year at University of Washington as a postdoc before joining the faculty of CU Boulder. His research interests include natural language processing and computational social science. He has published papers primarily at ACL and WWW, and also at KDD, WSDM, ICWSM, etc. His work has been covered by many news media outlets, such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and NPR All Things Considered. He also won a Facebook fellowship and a Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenges award.

Abstract: Language delivers more than its semantic meaning in social interaction. How a message or an argument is worded can change people's minds and actions. To study this ubiquitous phenomenon scientifically and account for confounding factors, the abundance of online social interaction provides great opportunities. This talk will focus on analyzing the effect of wording by leveraging online conversations. The settings range from message virality on Twitter to argument effectiveness on the ChangeMyView subreddit. This talk will also present recent efforts to assist individuals in creative writing with a machine in the loop.