We study the ways in which we can use data to understand human behavior, and we address questions about how data and data processing are shaping how we work, how we live, and what it means to be a person in a networked, digitized world. We also design and build new tools for using data collections inside and outside of the University.
Our projects include uncovering the pattern of official secrecy by examining databases of declassified documents, a personalized news engine that creates a kind of algorithmic editorial voice, and a visual study of Thomson-Reuter’s Web of Science. Columbia has a long track record of startups in the new media field, including Newsblaster, MPEG, Dygest, and Musically Intelligent Machines.
We are a diverse group of creative technologists, designers and scientists. with participants from the fields of architecture, the humanities, the social sciences, education, journalism, computer science, and engineering.
This project uses natural language processing to analyze large amounts of textual and speech data, particularly interactive data, to find relations among people, and between people and propositions (such as sentiment or belief), and to identify when such relations change in an unexpected manner.
The enormous growth in the number of official documents – many of them withheld from scholars and journalists even decades later – has raised serious concerns about whether traditional research methods are adequate for ensuring government accountability. But the millions of documents that have been released, often in digital form, also create opportunities to use natural language processing and statistical/machine learning to explore the historical record in very new ways.
This is an NSF-funded project at LabROSA concerned with separating and recognizing acoustic sources in complex, real-world mixtures.
Center for Spatial Research Columbia’s Groups for Experimental Methods in the Humanities EdLab Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theories and Empirics Lab for Recognition and Organization of Speech and Audio Written Interaction and Social Relations