Defence of dissertation in the field of computer science, Sanja Scepanovic, M.Sc.(Tech)

Data science: from socioeconomic estimates to Web cybersecurity

Sanja Scepanovic, M.Sc. (Tech)  will defend the dissertation: "Data science for sociotechnical systems:from computational sociolinguistics to the smart grid" on 9 February 2018 at 13 o'clock at the Aalto University School of Science. In this dissertation, we study applications of data science to the real-world big datasets. The results reveal that data science can support diverse sociotechnical systems.

Have you ever wondered how mobile phone call data can be used to support socio-economic census estimates in a developing African country? In this dissertation, we answer this question and we study other applications of data science to real-world big datasets. The results reveal that data science can support diverse sociotechnical systems, as follows.

First, nowadays abundant, online social-network traces enable us to look at existing sociological theories from a new angle. Concretely, we test theories of homophily and the happiness paradox by analysing Twitter and Wikipedia datasets. Second, data science application to energy-consumption datasets can lead to more efficient energy utilization, both at homes and in large computing centres. Third, security vendors can apply network analysis and machine-learning methods on large Web crawls to improve detection of malicious Web content.

We conclude this dissertation by presenting a systematic overview and lessons learned from the data-science process undertaken in each project.

Dissertation release (pdf)

Opponent: Professor Fosca Giannotti, National Research Council of Italy, Italy

Custos: Professor Aristides Gionis, Aalto University School of Science, Department of Computer Science