Why Computer Scientists Need to Understand Consumer Behavior: Prabhakar Raghavan
Channel: Alter Lab
Date: 30/04/2014

March 28, 2014, Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute Distinguished Seminar, University of Utah.

https://alterlab.org/announcements/Raghavan_2014_Seminar.pdf

Abstract: As computing has moved definitively from the glass cage to a billion handhelds, new applications (and in turn new challenges and paradigms in computing) have moved from government labs (circa 1960) to the enterprise (circa 1990) to the consumer today. During this period, the intellectual forces defining the path of computing have moved from the physical sciences through econometrics, to the understanding of human behavior at a large scale. We illustrate this with several examples, then argue the need for an emergent academic discipline of computational social science. 

Biography: Prabhakar Raghavan is a Vice President of Strategic Technologies at Google. Raghavan is the co-author of the textbooks Randomized Algorithms and Introduction to Information Retrieval. He is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE. In 2009, he was awarded a Laurea honoris causa from the University of Bologna. From 2003 to 2009, Raghavan was the Editor-in-Chief of Journal of the ACM. He holds a Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a Bachelor of Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. Prior to joining Google, he worked at IBM, Verity, and Yahoo.