Abstract

Networks are the infrastructure of our social and professional life and also of modern information systems where billions of documents and entities are interlinked.
However, not all nodes are equal in these networks. Often we observe attributes (e.g. gender or ethnicity) that define the group membership of a node.
In this talk I will explore the role of minorities in social networks and information networks, provide empirical evidence for the disadvantage of minorities and discuss factors that may place minorities at a disadvantage.

Bio

Claudia Wagner is an assistant professor (W1) in Computer Science at University Koblenz-Landau and the interim Scientific Director of the department Computational Social Science at GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences. Wagner received her PhD from Graz University of Technology in 2013, before she joined GESIS as postdoctoral researcher (2013-2016).
Prior to that she conducted several international research internships, among others at HP labs, Xerox PARC  and the Open University. To date, she has been awarded substantial research funding either as a PI or co-PI, was awarded with a DOC-fFORTE fellowship from the Austrian Academy of Sciences and received four best paper awards (at ESWC 2010, SocialCom 2012, ICWSM 2014, WebSci 2015).
Her research focuses on computational methods and models for analyzing social issues (e.g. gender inequality, sexism) and social phenomena (e.g. collective attention, culture) using digital traces.