Her research spans sentiment analysis, blogs, network arts, text classification and information retrieval. Her work on a digital theater system called Buzz has been exhibited both as artistic installations in Chicago's Second City Theater and Wired Magazine's NextFest, and as a marketing research tool at the Wrigley Global Marketing Summit. She earned her Bachelor's degree with honors in Mathematics and Computer Science from the DePauw University in 2002, and her Master's and PhD in Computer Science from the Northwestern University in 2007.